


Guilt Free Pleasures

by PurpleMoon3



Series: dresden_kink fills [3]
Category: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Laurell K. Hamilton, The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Angel vs. Vampire, Bribery with Burgers, Crossover, Dimension Travel, F/M, Gen, Harry-as-Anita, St. Louis thinks Anita has finally cracked, Timeline foolery, Vampire Council Shenanigans, because Harry is a happy little chaos butterfly, dresden_kink, gender bending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-02
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-02-11 11:56:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2067231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurpleMoon3/pseuds/PurpleMoon3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean-Claude attempts to lure in his elusive Human Servant by way of dream visitation.  Said human servant has other guests that don't share.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This short is part of the same universe as [Once in a Fool... Blue... THERE ARE MOONS](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1420540).

The sky was not blue.  Instead, when I glanced upward to the churning clouds there was a uniform expanse of something too dark to be a proper purple or violet.  I think Crayola had dubbed the shade plum, or maybe mulberry, but my knowledge of crayon colors is about twenty years out of date.  It was an unnatural sky, and I knew I wasn't in the Nevernever, so that left only one other option.  
  
"I'm dreaming."  I frowned at the realization.  I was usually too tired to dream, or at least remember any dreams, and the few I did fondly recall usually involved a petite, if muscular, blonde or cartoonish chase scenes with wacky physics.  There was also one standard that held true in all my dreams: I was male.  Sometimes shorter, sometimes taller, sometimes just right, but dreams were connected to the soul, the inner self, and my inner self was not a woman.  It didn't matter that I had recently hopped a reality or two and had come to take after my mother more than my giant of a father; inside where it mattered I was Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden - Wizard, Warden, and 100% Male.  
  
The exact metaphysics behind my being alive and female were confusing as all hell, I don't think even the Archive really understood it, but as much as I hated my weird ass backstory -the Universe/Cosmos/Architect/Theology of Choice can evidently write history backward as a sort of immune system for paradoxes or multiverse invasions, and had conveniently left me estranged from a family I knew next to nothing about- it was safer to remain here where I was still human than to try and find the Demonreach equivalent to crossover again.  For all I knew the next reality would find me as a dog and Ivy would be incarnated as a strand of creeper.  
  
"Oui, Ma Petite." A voice that touched things I didn't want touched called, and I shivered.  
  
"Oh.  It's you."  I hugged myself, pulling away from the vampire that on good days made me think of my brother Thomas, and on less than good days put me in the unsettled mind of Daddy Raith.  Neither of those were particularly inticing - rather the opposite, really.  The skirts of the ridiculous period dress Jean-Claude the Dream Invader had put me in rustled as I continued to move out of his reach.  "Do we really have to have the discussion about personal space, again?"  
  
He sighed like I was one of those annoying kids that keeps asking why.  He was dressed in his usual tight leather pants and froo-froo pirate shirt that exposed too much milk white skin and the cross shaped burn on his pectoral.  I had once asked him if he thought I was the Buttercup to his Dread Pirate but he hadn't understood the reference.  Unlike Westley, JC didn't seem the least inclined to follow my wishes.  Invading my sleep is only one example of his distinctly Humperdinck behavior.  
  
"Ma Petite,"  He started, reaching one hand out to me in a move that might have been endearing had I not known what he was.  "You are a dream far more lovely than any rose."  
  
"Did you get that from Hallmark?" I wrinkled my nose and fiddled with one of the many ribbons dangling from my bodice.  It was an actual bodice, laced in the front with ribbon, and it pushed my breasts up and together.  What I suspected was whalebone hugged my ribs and shortened my breath.  I very much doubted JC had ever worn one, or at least worn one that was designed for someone who actually needed to inhale.  "Now what is so damned important you couldn't pick up a phone?  You know, like a normal people do?"  
  
His face went blank, that careful neutral mask of boredom that was obvious in its obliviousness.  Thomas' pokerface was better, mainly because you couldn't tell when he was trying to hide something.  Jean-Claude sighed, and in a blink he had crossed the steps I'd put between us and was running his hand along my bare arm.  It made my skin break out in gooseflesh, but he took my shudder to mean the opposite of what it actually did.  The creeper tried to touch my face -the supernaturals of this world were always trying to touch my face- and I caught his wrist in my hand, in a grip that with a little shifting of body mass I could use to snap it.  I wanted to break the thing on principle, but it was hard to move.  I felt like I was wading through molasses and it wasn't fair that the bastard had more control over my dreams than even I did.  They were my damn dreams!  
  
"I have tried to call, Ma Petite, and left several messages with your leopard."    
  
"Yeah, Vivian told me.  My lack of reply should have been all the answer you need."    
  
He shook his head, all that rich dark hair falling like a wave of satin.  "I do not speak of dinners and dates, Ma Petite,"  I narrowed my eyes at that little endearment.  I hated it.  I used to be several heads taller than him, and now… I stuffed down the spark of anger in favor of surprise as a face I hadn't seen in almost a year approached us, rising out of the mist like the Dark Knight.  "You are my human servant, and this strange behavior… I worry.  To our enemies it is, how you would say, like putting chum in the waters.  But together we can hold the city.  I beg you… relent…"  
  
I had a front row seat as Jean-Claude's eyes popped wide in shock as an Evil!Harry gripped him by the hair and hauled him off me.    
  
"No means no, asshole."  Evil!Harry said in very annoyed, gravely tone.  It might have been narcissistic, but I thought his Evil!Goatee was rather fetching.    
  
The evil version of me wasn't alone.  I hadn't heard from her once since blinking to awareness in a graveyard all those months ago, and she definitely looked worse for wear, but she also managed to look even more pissed than the Darth version of myself did as she descended from on high.  
  
Lash was wearing a different outfit than I remember, and her hair was mouse brown instead of the blonde she used to favor.  Leather armor in the style of a roman legionary clothed her, and she had acquired wings since I last saw her.  There were eight of them, massive and dangerous looking and I had no idea how they were supposed to coordinate, and she touched down gracefully -HA!- as JC and E!H tussled.  Her appearance was enough to stun the vampire, his eyes wide with fear, his fangs visible in his open mouth, and my other half took the opportunity to throw JC to the ground at Lash's sandal clad feet.  
  
"You dare…"  Lash's voice was hoarse.  If I didn't know better I'd have said she'd been to Hell and back.  "You dare force yourself into my home, and attempt to suborn my host.  I may be little more than a fallen shade, but I am still an Angel and you, you are less than swine."  
  
I clapped my hands over my ears as Darth Harry stepped in front of my crouched form.  Lash was holding JC by the throat, hand wreathed in Hellfire, and the vampire was screaming.  I could feel pain around my own throat, though it was a dull echo, and then there was blessed silence.  
  
"Hey."  Bizarro Batman coughed, nudging me with a boot.  
  
I looked up, sighing as my evil self offered his duster and I took it.  Instantly the dress melted away and I was once again a guy.  Lash landed beside us with a wobble.  "Hello, my host."  
  
I was smiling.  I might have been crying.  I'd never really liked them before, Evil!Harry was everything I could have been if I didn't keep my moral compass finely tuned.  Lash was as good as a clone of a fallen angel who specialized in tempting and seducing mortals till they were little more than puppets.  I blinked to clear my eyes, suddenly filled with the insane urge to hug her.  I offered her a crooked grin, running a finger along her new attributes.  "Someone's been mainlining Red Bull."


	2. Chapter 2

Nearly a fortnight had passed before I saw Jean-Claude again, and when I did it was a surreal affair.  We were at one of his many business establishments, this one a gothic themed restaurant called Chantilly Lace.  It was one of his tamer businesses with the wait staff fully clothed in Victorian themed dresses and suits. The building had been constructed for more intimate seating between patrons with thick dividing walls between booths and little alcoves off to the side.  Jean-Claude and myself had been escorted to a separate room normally reserved for large parties.  
  
I sat at one end of the table and JC the other.  There was a good five feet separating us, and a burning candelabra acted as both midpoint and barrier, but the cravat at Jean-Claude's throat stood out like winter fae in the midst of summer.  The vampire preferred shirts that gaped and flashed his pale expanse of chest and the sudden disappearance of all that skin took a moment to get used to.    
  
I hadn't really thought Lash's fire would leave a lasting mark, but the media darling hadn't been seen in two weeks and now his throat was covered?  Could dreams really hurt you?  
  
Apparently so, but he shouldn't have been in my head in the first place.  I had no reason to feel guilty.  
  
I shifted in my seat as a teen in a top hat grinned at me, presenting a silver plate of burgers.  The scent wafting off the meal was mouth watering, and I knew Chantilly Lace did not serve something so plebeian as hamburgers, which meant someone had gone out and bought Burger King before bringing it back, soda pop included.  
  
Okay. So I felt a tiny, irrational wriggling of guilt.  That did not mean I was going to apologize.  _I_ hadn't done anything wrong.  
  
The kid poured Jean-Claude and I some wine, something red, and left.  We were alone.  JC steepled his fingers and stared at me from across the table.  There was something in his eyes, a wariness to his shoulders but a want and hunger in those soulless oceans.  I almost put down my burger, then remembered that I was Harry Fucking Dresden, and scarfed the deliciousness.  Endorphins rushed all tingly through my brain, and I sipped my coke in a haze of fullness.  
  
One corner of Jean-Claude's mouth twitched, like he was fighting a smile.  
  
"Ma peite meurtrière…"  
  
I thought of Bianca, and the power of words.  Did he mean I was his hired gun, or that I would be the one to kill him dead, dead?  I sighed and swirled my straw around in the glass.  "I appreciate the food, but what's the occasion?"  
  
Jean-Claude echoed my sigh.  "The Vampire Council," I made a face, anything with 'vampire' and 'council' couldn't be good.  "Has been asking questions.  In particular Belle Morte.  One of our oldest laws, second only to the rule of secrecy, is the extermination of necromancers."  
  
I felt a chill, and a pair of slender ghost arms wrapped around me from behind.  Lash's chin rested comfortingly against the top of my head as she stared at the incubus.  Of course, Jean-Claude couldn't see her, but it was the thought that counted.  "But if they kill me, wouldn't that kill you, too?"  
  
"Very likely… Harriet."  Well, that was positively an olive branch.  He'd been calling me Anita and Ma Petite like my decision to be me was teenager's rebellious phase.  "But the waters are a bit muddy, in our case.  It is only suspected that you may be a necromancer.  Most certainly a strong animator, but also my Human Servant."  
  
I raised one hand, and he looked at me expectantly.  "See, I don't like that term.  I am not your servant."  
  
"It is what you are, and cannot be undone.  We are bound."  He said it like a man who had this conversation too many times to care anymore.  
  
I shrugged.  "Maybe so.  But I am not your servant.  Servant implies that I change your sheets and take your notes and throw out the bodies after you get done with them."  He blinked at me.  "So, no, I am not your servant."  
  
"I am beginning to understand why the Council is so concerned."  
  
I made a sound of inquiry around burger number two.  Nothing was hopeless so long as there was grease and cheese wrapped in a warm bun.  
  
"Belle Morte and Padma have posited that while you may not have been a full fledged Necromancer before joining in our Triumvirate, the increase in power has cemented you as such.  With the control over the undead that a Necromancer has…"  He made a circling motion with one hand as if that explained everything.  My blank stare had him sighing again as he elaborated.  "They are concerned that you have become the Master, and I the Servant."  
  
I burst out laughing.  I couldn't help it.  It was true I was a necromancer, but only in the same sense that someone who practiced medicine was a doctor.  In this new world, new body, death magic came easiest to me but it wasn't my only talent.  I was still a wizard.  Sure, I was still puzzling out how to do everything I used to but I could still throw fire and brew potions.  I'd managed to find a lightning struck tree when we went to bail Richard out of Po-Dunk prison, and now I even had a new staff.  
  
In demonstration, I flung out my right hand and said, " _Ventas_."  
  
The four-foot-five pole of carved and sanded wood sailed from the corner I had left it and smacked satisfyingly into my palm.  It was interesting that after death, wind magic was my next best skill.  I'd even figured out how to cut from a distance* with it, though that took more concentration than I normally had available during a fight.  
  
Jean-Claude's eyes were that weird, empty hunger again.  I stood and began to pace, thinking.  This Council of Creepers sounded very familiar.  I had too much power -too much power that wasn't theirs- and they wanted to kill me for it.  Nothing new.  
  
"I'm not your servant."  I said, again, and could practically feel JC tracking me as I walked.  My staff made little muffled thuds in the carpet with each step. "And I'm not a Necromancer, not like that."  
  
"Would that the Council believed that, Ma Petite.  Belle Morte is sending her emissary to discover our, ah, relationship for herself."  
  
I stopped and stared at my feet.  They were tiny feet.  I missed being able to tower over people.   
  
"I'm a really shitty actor."  I said instead.  Jean-Claude chuckled darkly, as if he was one drink away from drunk.  It was a laugh that tapped my chin, asking me to look up.  To trust.  To please do this one thing.  "Who is she sending?"  
  
"Musette and her retinue arrived last night, three months ahead of schedule.  Her unannounced arrival has allowed us some leeway, but you will be expected at the welcoming later this evening. I… apologize for the suddenness, Harriet."  
  
"Hells bells."  I muttered, rubbing my face.  No wonder he had been so desperate to talk to me.  I had a few undead informants, and vampires liked to gossip about their celebrities, so I knew exactly what kind of monster Musette was.  I had a vague idea of what she had done to JC and vague was enough.  I leaned against my staff, nodding to myself.  "I'll go.  I'll be your Knight in Leather Duster, if you like, and I'll watch your back."  
  
I grinned, mentally whispering _flickum bicus_.  The candles on the table flared, the flames jetting a foot into the air before settling back down.  
  
I had a feeling a building would burn down before the night was over, and it would _totally_ be my fault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * An actual ability Anita first expressed in Burnt Offerings.
> 
> Translation:
> 
> Ma peite meurtrière… My little murderess.


	3. Resignation Notice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Totally didn't plan on continuing this. But the muse muses.

My Jeep was in the shop -we'd had a disagreement with a self-obsessed werehyena- so I was already in a cranky mood before stepping into my Boss' office for an emergency meeting. The one early raising on my plate had gone smoothly, a simple affair with questions for the deceased that would allow the prosecutor to make some circumstantial evidence quite a bit more substantial, so I should have had another hour and half to pretty myself up for the ball. Instead, I was back at the office because. Because Bert.

“Blake. Animator's Inc. has already accepted the consultation fee. The McNally's have flown in from Chicago to see you - _you_ \- you cannot cancel the appointment.” Bert stated, gray eyes at flinty odds with his understanding tone. I wasn't half as able with fire magic as I used to be, but he was dripping so much snake oil lighting up the room would be a breeze. He was standing, nigh looming, from his side of the carved maple desk in an intimidation tactic that had never been effective. He was big, bulky, and as I understood it had a business acumen that would make a fae golf clap in acknowledgment.

I kind of hated him, but he was my boss, and if late night sit coms had taught me anything it was shitty bosses were normal. For all that I disliked about my brave new world that normalcy was something I'd come to treasure. But was it worth this? My hands ached to hold my blasting rod. The lamp on the desk flickered.

“If you had bothered asking Vivian you would know I wouldn't have taken their case, anyway! I've already made promises for tonight, and if a court ruling isn't at stake I don't give a shit!” I was yelling. To anyone on the other side of door I probably sounded unreasonable. Maybe I was being a little unreasonable, but Bert acted just because he kept track of the paychecks and made the appointments he could lord it over the rest of us. Of me. I simmered, the cool rage of power pushing against my skin like a beast trying to claw it's way out.

I hadn't put up with that shit from Marcone, stars, even _Mab_ had respected the limits I set. Such as she did.

The corner of Bert's lip twitched. The cadence of his voice changed. “When you had your little snit, _Harriet_ , I put up with it-”

“-and I conceded that for professional purposes I would keep using Anita!” The lightbulb on the desk popped as I shouted, Bert let out a low 'fuck' under his breath, and in the lengthened shadows I saw a pair of sparkling, amused blue eyes. Pink lips curved into a proud smile as the angel of my nightmares watched ideas churn in my head.

The be suited footballer eyed the standing lamp in the corner. “But the contract has been signed. The money exchanged. We have an obligation to the client.”

With, well, _everything_ the bug that had crawled up Bert's butt had been my name. A compromise, and not a big one considering, but now that I thought about it instead of running from one case to another... if Bert was the brains behind Animator's, Inc. then I was the face. Anita Blake, Zombie Queen. Anita Blake, Executioner. When someone needed a 100+ year old corpse up and walking they didn't come to Animator's, Inc. They came to _me_. As assuring as a regular paycheck was...

“You.” I growled, and for not the first time I lamented not being able to look into his eyes without instigating a Soul Gaze. Unfortunately, I could see as he took this lack of eye contact as sign of him winning the argument. His shoulder's relaxed. He started to smile apologetically as he opened a drawer and removed a packets of fresh bulbs. From the shadows, soundless laughter pealed like a church bell. “You have an obligation.”

My magic purred under my skin. Cold. Comfortable. I wasn't scrambling for any shit cheating husband or lost dog just to make rent. Not anymore. I was Harry Dresden. Zombie Queen of St. Louis. I had my own damn house, bought and paid for. Minions. I killed supernatural monsters regularly and each corpse brought a nice little bonus home.

“Ms. Blake, breaking the contract at this time would incur steep penalties on our side. If you don't even meet with them..”

I leaned on Bert's so nice, so professional, hand carved desk. He probably wrote it off as a business expense. The heavy weight of my gun hit the side of the desk with a dull thud as gravity dragged the pocket of my coat forward. I dug my nails into the green felt square on top. There were no windows to Bert's office. The lamp in the corner joined the ranks of the dying. Shadows swarmed the walls and I basked in the clarity of my rage, wind tugging at my hair and for a moment I was the one looming like motherfucking Gandalf.

I could see the stark fear bleaching his skin even under the bottle-tan he was so proud of. “You can take that contract, and eat it, Ernie. I fucking quit.”

Darkness filled the room, broken only by Bert's heartbeat echoing in my mouth as glass tinkled onto his papers. I didn't need what little light filtered in through the cracks around the door. Turning, I walked in step with the brunette that linked her arm in mine. Lash didn't say anything, but her chest rubbed against my arm as she gestured. Something rippled through me and the door to the hallway swung open.

My rage guttered like a candle. “Do not worry, my Host. A parlor trick, nothing more. But I know his sort...” Lash's lips brushed against my ear, and perfectly rounded nails squeezed my upper arm. “What you are thinking... even if I wished you to take up the Coin, such is impossible, now.”

“We will discuss this, later.” She hummed in agreement, but shaking her off would have looked... strange. Stranger. Instead she vanished into the back of my mind like a rose-scented fog. My personal assistant and one of my dependents, Vivian, looked up from the guest chair she had colonized. Her eyes widened behind the costume glasses she wore solely because she knew I got a kick out of them. Tight vest, pencil skirt, she looked like a sexy librarian most of the time. At the moment she looked like a scared mouse. “H-Harriet. A-are you okay?”

I forced a smile to my face. I probably looked deranged. Anger and stress does that.

I had one hour to get dressed and get down town to meet Miss Muffet and fly the flag. Though, as I understood it our were-rat driver could be a real demon behind the wheel when she wanted to.


	4. Chapter 4

As it turned out, despite Claudia's nigh-illegal driving skills at our disposal, it was physically impossible to stop at the house for clothes _and_ get to the Circus in time for my appointment. I wasn't surprised, even as I flailed about half naked in the back seat, because the distance from the city had been one of the main selling points for me moving from my bullet riddled apartment to the wooded outskirts. One of the downsides to magic being out in the open was that the nuclear option of bringing the mortals into supernatural politics didn't exist. Vampires, werewolves, and voodoo priestess wouldn't think twice about bringing literal human shields to the party, or taking an unfortunate jogger as a hostage. They barely thought once.

Luckily, I was a wizard, which was almost like being a boy scout.

“Hells _bells_.” I hissed when our driver abruptly slowed and we boarded the off ramp onto the access road. The change in speed and course had sent me falling forward, my arms whipping up just in time to catch my face from slamming into Jason's head rest.

“Niiiiiiice.” The werewolf leered. I'd been in the middle of adjusting my bra -taking them off was easy, putting them on was a pain- and now my modesty was preserved only by the tinted windows Rafael equipped all his vehicles with. I frowned and jabbed the middle and pointer finger of my scarred arm at his face. He yelped and jerked away, rubbing at his watering eyes with a muttered curse.

“Nyuk. Nyuk. Nyuk.” I smiled sweetly. I had never gone to a therapist about turning into a woman -how would I even start?- but my body dysphoria was less about my lack of dick and more my lack of height. I did not particularly care about my appearance, the curves or the scars I had only the faintest idea the origin of, I still looked in mirrors and saw a stranger, but that was no excuse. “Eyes front, Curly.”

Claudia laughed, shoulder's shaking as she weaved in and out of traffic. I gave up on the hooks and tossed the push-up to the floor while Vivian fished the sports bra out of my Animating duffle. Death magic came in a variety of forms, and when raising zombies I had two primary methods. The first, the one I had once used to ride a tyrannosaurus through the city streets of Chicago, involved using my own magic and will to create a bridge of sorts between the target and the, well, soul of the target was probably the easiest way to put it even if souls were not necessarily involved. I then provided a heartbeat to substitute for the zombie's lack and chain it to my will.

The heartbeat could be anything from a drum to the west side boys snapping their ridiculously synchronized fingers. The downside was that while I did not need a sacrifice to raise the dead using this method, my control was dependent on keeping the beat. Without a dedicated drummer it was all too easy to loose control of one's creation.

The second method, and the one I employed most often in this world, involved a blood sacrifice to draw forth the memory of the dead. It involved salt, iron, and magic circles. Very ritualistic and something I had been grateful for that first week. I _knew_ circles. Even if the circles were created with the blood of a freshly slaughtered chicken or goat.

To deal with the inevitable bloody fallout I'd taken to keeping a fresh change of clothes in my bag. That preparation was paying in full now. With one last push to settle my boobs in their new home, I shrugged into the tight tee Ivy had sent me for my not-Birthday. That had been embarrassing; not knowing my own birthday. Still, the present was thoughtful and a piece of home that was comforting in its own way.

“Huh.” I peered out the window at the empty parking lot. “This close to Halloween? Figured the place would be packed.”

“Closed for Council Business.” Jason spoke up, as we went around back to the employee parking spaces. He was exaggeratedly rubbing at one eye. Wimp. “As it is, Jean-Claude tried to argue to keep it open. Looks less suspicious that way, and I think he almost won over the Traveler.”

I grunted and finished tying my bootlaces. We parked. “So what stopped him?”

“The Council. A bunch of civilians upstairs would have meant they would have to keep a tighter leash on their representatives. Would have given Jean-Claude an advantage, small one, but still.” It was Claudia who answered me. “And, this is where I leave you, Harriet.”

Vivian was helping me slip my arms into my duster. I felt my forehead crease in confusion. “You're not coming?”

Black within black eyes glanced toward the back door to the Circus. Inches thick steel and bolted to brick, it was a door that would stop a Zombie Apocalypse even better than the one I once had installed in my never to been seen again basement apartment. Claudia shook her head.

“No. I got my orders, elsewhere. Won't be far though. Having the Council in town like this...” she shrugged, the movement of her shoulders so smooth it was almost fluid. From one moment to the next, her cheekbones looked more shadowed. Angular. “...the Rom isn't happy. Kinda pissed, actually. He's had dealings with Council lackeys in the past under Nikolaos.”

I just nodded and pretended to know what she was talking about. I knew that I, that Anita, had killed the former Master of the City with Kincaid's help. I just didn't really remember how. We hadn't emerged into this reality until a few months after those events, and like the scars on my arms those memories were hazy. Like trying to remember a made for TV movie that had been running in the background while cooking Thanksgiving dinner for a family of twelve.

I threaded my lighter through the loops at my back and accepted my staff from a trembling Vivian. You couldn't see it in her face, but as the dark skin of her fingers brushed mine I felt the vibrations. I sighed. “Claudia?”

She stopped, hadn't gotten but a few feet, and turned.

“Could you take Vi with you? Or, call her a cab or something?”

“N-No!” My leopard barked, which was weird. Her eyes looked luminous under the round glass panes. “You're the Nimir-Ra. I should go with you. Jean-Claude will have his vampires, the Ulfric will have wolves...”

She stood two inches taller than me. I leaned my staff into the crook of my elbow and placed a hand on each shoulder. The skin flexed, pain free. I smiled as gently as I could. “Vivian. I know. And I need you to go with Claudia. Do you know why?”

She bit her lip, and nodded. Her answer was so soft only I, or the fuzzy-inclined would have been able to hear it. It made me want to punch someone. Ones. “...I'm weak. We all are...”

I leaned forward, rolling my weight to the balls of my feet, and whispered in her ear. “The Circus being empty isn't only going to benefit the Council.”

As I rocked back onto my heels and away from her stunned expression, I caught my blurry reflection in the van window. My eyes were a star field. Huh. I didn't know they could do that. At Jason's call, I followed him through the great steel door, past the few rooms above ground, and down the gullet of the damned. The stairs would have been annoying if I were my old self. Now, they were just plain insulting with the end of my leather duster dragging along each step.

We reached the bottom in short order, the stairs opening up to stone pathways branching in several directions. Some effort had gone into renovating the place, rugs and curtains softening areas. The occasional sculpture and oil painting. It was a veneer of civility; humanity. The distinct lack of personnel in the corridors detracted from the effort, however, and everything felt more like a haunted mansion.

The last time I had been to the Circus of the Damned, I'd killed prehistoric Vampire who wielded Earth Magic like it was play-dough. Before that, though I didn't really remember it, I'd cut off the head of a millennium old vampire and shotgunned a good portion of her coven. Let's see if I can go for the Hat Trick.

I lifted a curtain of gauze out of the way only to have a pair of midnight blue coals boring into me. Jean-Claude's face was blank, as was that of every other vampire in the room. Somehow, Damien was a lighter shade of pale than his usual.

“You want, to kill the Council.”

Shit. Had I mused out loud?

An end table by the chaise caught my eye. “Hey, are those sugar donuts?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clothes porn, because AB:VH. But tempered by Harry being Harry. And Jean-Claude has decided on a method for taming his wild human servant. It just so happens he can indulge his own fetishes using it.

I swaggered over to the confectionery goodness and ate one whole. An indecent groan escaped me. The donuts were still warm with granules of sugar melting on my tongue. Jean-Claude was most definitely buttering me up if he had these on hand; vampires couldn't eat people food at all without vomiting, and even wine had to be liberally spiked with blood. As I perched on the chaise, delicate plate of goodies on my lap, the Master of the City approached with a face that was very, very interesting. It was a face that wanted to be exasperated, and afraid, and amused all at once but supreme supernatural will maintained the pleasantly blank façade.

I set my left arm across my knees, wrapping around and hunching protectively over _my_ lovelies as I surveyed the room properly.

“Harriet.” JC stood before me, for once not in skin tight leathers and draping silks like the cover of a harlequin romance. Such, I decided as I bought myself time to think by tossing another delicious treat in my mouth, wasn't a good sign. As much as I disliked the pompous vampire, and the situation being Bound to him put me in, him being at the top of the local vampire food chain allowed an equilibrium within the city that worked. No one major faction had grievance with another so I didn't have to deal with the supernatural gang fights of yesteryear, and with the exception of Malcolm and his insanity Jean-Claude kept his own followers on tight leash.

Tonight, he had forgone his usual style of dress for something more dated. Leather boots that stopped halfway up his thigh were typical, but these were a looser fit to accommodate the dark fabric of the pants tucked into them. He wore a long-skirted, high collared jerkin of bronze brocade. Deep black stitching created a swirling pattern of fronds to tame the brightness of the silk. Over everything Jean-Claude had tossed a sleeveless jacket of midnight fur, wolf if I were a betting man, but it was the rapier at his hip that surprised me most of all.

The last time JC had pulled a sword was when the Earthmover had come to kill the city.

My eyes skipped around the room. Damien in leather pants that laced up the side, a simple vest, and his sword. I was pretty sure he slept with the thing. Meng Die, too, wore a pair of short daggers sheathed at the milky caramel of her thighs. Those sheaths matched the leather corset that hugged her waist like armor, a coppery suede spilling above and below. Even Willie, the youngest vampire present, had forgone his usual tacky and disarming suits in favor of dark brown slacks and a loose button-up. He was flicking a knife open and close, open and close.

“You must not attack the Council, not without provocation.” Jean-Claude spoke simply as he came to a stop in front of me. The steel toes of my boots very nearly touched his leather. Our little meeting at Chantilly Lace had been quick and dirty by necessity, what with his need to coordinate with his minions and my own human drama, and as such beyond a guest list I didn't have nearly as much information as I would have liked.

I frowned a brushed some invisible crumbs off of my tee shirt. _Dresden, The Vampire Slayer_ splashed across my chest in familiar stylized script. “Them being here is provocation enough.”

“The Council have questions. So long as hospitality is followed, it is their right to inspect the holdings of their vassals. Particularly when a new Master has risen to power over a City. A vetting process, if you will.”

“I thought that was why Asher was here.” As soon as the words left my mouth I realized how inaccurate they were. Vampires littered the room, all the ones JC had that were either on the upper end of the power scale or skilled enough to level the field, but my favorite two-face expy wasn't lurking in his usual shadows. “Where is the lug, anyway?”

The quiet flicking of Willie's knife went silent, and Jean-Claude's face remained neutral as ever. It was Meng Die who answered, lip curling in a fang-flashing sneer. “With Musette. Fuck him.”

Ouch.

Jean-Claude made a sound that could have been either agreement or disappointment. I licked sugar from my fingers as the master vampire knelt down, his hands hovering just over my knees. I watched his eyes track my fingers, his lips parting as he swallowed back unspoken words. It didn't last long.

“We have been lucky.” He started, removing the plate and setting it aside before I could raise the crumb covered porcelain to my face. “The Earthmover's own surreptitious behavior before bringing his retinue to St. Louis worked in our favor, as have certain... rumors... involving yourself. Asher has only ever been honest in his intentions-”

“-he did threaten to rape me.” I felt compelled to point it out. Granted the threat only lasted as long as it took him to realize the relationship between myself and Jean-Claude, and he only stayed because of the sense of schadenfreude watching us gave him, but the fact he would think to even try...

...I'd considered, more than once, finishing the job the Church started. But JC had to have warm memories that intruded every time my finger drifted toward the trigger.

“-and, his alliance, has never been in question. At the dinner we must present a united front of strength, I would have-”

Whatever Jean-Claude would have us do, I would never find out. Richard came through the same entrance I did, flanked by this body guards. He looked good; relaxed and comfortable in his fashionably ripped jeans, tee, and flannel. Unlaced boots. It was amazing how nearly having your mother sacrificed to a demon could change one's outlook on life. A golden chain hung around his neck and disappeared under the white tee.

“Jean-Claude.” Richard gave a manly nod to our third and plopped down on the other end of the lounge. Jamil took up a spot just behind and to the side, and past experience told me where to look to see where cloth folded and hid the hand cannon the other werewolf wielded.

“Mon loup.” JC returned the greeting. I bared my teeth at the sight of the chest Shang-Da carried over one shoulder like it was a sack of flour.

I glanced from JC to Richard to the bodyguards as the master vampire before me stood up, back straight, body turning to encompass us both. Something unseen brushed against my arm with the delicate touch of a moth's wing. The Ulfric's wolf eyes peered lazily at me from beneath the shadow of his bangs. “How does it feel,” I asked, leaning on the armrest of the chaise. “To be the only two sane men in the room?”

Jamil belted out a laugh that was echoed by some vampire I didn't know, and even Meng Die cracked her guard of anger for a snort of humor. Unimpressed, Shang-Da dropped the chest at our feet with a grunt and went to flank Richard. I flinched at bit at the soft rattle of glass when heavy wood hit stone. The rug between the two was pretty much a null factor. “Zane didn't give you any trouble?”

“He tried.” Richard shrugged. “Not very hard.”

“I'll talk to him.” I said instead, expecting another headache. Zane was weird. Funny. Loyal. But he got the strangest ideas when it came to Pard business and his Nimir-Ra. Like he was afraid Richard was going to try poaching me, or something. I slid off the chaise and began the process of opening the mundane and magically locked chest while Jean-Claude got to business.

“The Council are experts at discovering what you fear most, and using it against you. They will have arranged the dinner with the express purpose of unsettling us, testing our control and resolve. We must not give them an opening to exploit; do not offend against them, or they shall take their recompense out of you and yours. However, you must also not allow them to goad or offend yourselves unchecked less that be seen as a weakness itself. Whatever else, we _must not be seen as weak_.”

The chest popped open even as Jean-Claude's final words sent a chill down my spine, like a clawed finger had stroked it. In the back of my mind a creature of fire and ill faith stirred at the challenge. For all the Master of the City was trying to impress on us the seriousness of the situation I just felt irritated and annoyed by it all. Sad as it was, powerful nigh godly immortals throwing their weight around was par-for-course for me.

Richard, for all his body language said he didn't give a fuck, had steel in his spine. I'm not sure what it was that changed him, staring at my soul or staring into the face of demon, but he'd gone from reluctant chieftain to wolf king and had the power and will to back it up. Any threat to the pack was one he took in his jaws and _ripped_.

“Treat them like members of the Faery Courts.” I said, half to myself and half in reply, as I began removing vials of sparkling silver liquid from their resting places. “Watch the wording and make no deals, sure. But, JC, they're gonna see us as weak no matter what we do. They are ancient assholes. If they don't like us, they don't like us, and nothing is going to change that bar you, maybe, flamenco dancing on their crushed skulls.”

I popped up, nose to his neck, arms full. “Here.”

He accepted one of the containers, looking at it in wonder as his fingers brushed against the glass. The glowing motes swirled and gathered around the contact points. “What, what is this?”

“Escape potions.” I stated, deadpan. Escape potions were the single most useful tool I'd found in any Wizard arsenal. They bought time. With time, a Wizard could do damn near anything. The downside to crafting them, aside from the usual time sink that was potion making, was the ingredients. Every wizard was different, and while certain similarities could be found across the board -eight components were needed, peppermint was an energizer, sunlight an element of the light side of the force- each and every wizard had personalized ingredients.

In my case the original recipe I'd derived with Bob's help. I didn't have Bob anymore, but I had Ivy a phone call away, and several were-leopards eager to make donations to the cause. Energy drinks had been a main part of the old potion, and arguably the cheapest as I'd turned to Jolt and Motoroil to balance the lack of freshly shed Cheetah fur, but the magical umph from brushing out Vivian and Nathaniel and the rest of the pard in turn on full moons more than made up for it. The end result was a potion that resulted in a rocky, jumbled roller-coaster of a ride but expanded range.

Each stoppered glass container I had divided the potion among was enough for one trip. No take backs. I explained this as I made my rounds around the room. The vampires were both wary and curious, but their potions disappeared in their costumes readily enough. Richard's bodyguards, and Richard himself, also received a vial. There was an upper limit to how much excess mass the spell could transport, but in my tests I hadn't managed to find that limit. I suspected it changed with every person who drank the potion depending on their own innate magical strength, and told the assembled this.

There were more escape potions than bodies in the room. Willie picked up the remainder at Jean-Claude's nod and vanished through a curtain concealed passage.

“Ma petite.” Jean-Claude's eyes gleamed, and he offered an arm like a gentleman. For this once, in the name of solidarity in the face of foreign invasion, I accepted. My knuckles ached from squeezing my staff tight in my other hand. It was odd being on this end of the chivalry slide, and Richard was a line of strangely welcome heat on my right as we headed out. I gathered my magic, my will, in a tight, cold coil around me. Jean-Claude's breathe was at my ear. “I thank you for your gift, Harriet, but I would hope talks with the Council do not devolve so far. This is an assessment, not an attack.”

And I was a thrice damned dewdrop fairy.

He had a _sword_ strapped to his _hip!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, thoughts on Jean-Claude: He is not nearly as adept at reading human/vampire interaction and social cues as he, and everyone else, thinks he is. Guy has a great pokerface. But right after his best friend swears vengeance on him for failing to be fireproof he spent a hundred years stuck in box in sensory deprivation/isolation possibly being trotted out only for the odd occasion that Belle needed another incubus/succubus around. Then when he made parole he booked it on the closest boat to put an ocean between him and Belle Morte. This does not for a well adjusted vampire make. So what we have here is a JC trying desperately to keep his head above water and establish himself with legitimacy so the fucking council of fuckers will go away and leave him alone to foodgasm with his Harriet.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by Asher, who is a little shit and has been telling tales. Also, we finally get to the bits my muse wanted me to write. Vampire dialog is hard. Tried to tone down the mustache twirling I remember from my AB read through years ago. And Padma is not present, because he doesn't give a fuck about Jean-Claude and has no reason to be.

Two were-rats, not Rafael's, in that mid-way transformed state that only practiced alpha's could achieve hauled on the heavy rings that opened the doors to our destination. The oak creaked as the hinges swung open, revealing a web of horrors. We stepped across the threshold of smoothed stone to a chamber that retained much of the raw cavern it used to be, not unlike the Raith Deeps. Thin ropes, strings braiding together for a moment before splintering off in different directions, crisscrossed the room in a riot of red and blue; a network of veins reaching into the unseen vault of the ceiling. Firelight flickered from wall sconces and the whole web shifted. Or maybe it was just the darkness.

Not all of our honor guard could stay with us. As I understood it, Jean-Claude was only able to negotiate a dinner party of equal size to the Council's gofers. A long table awaited, chairs, and empty settings of silver all nestled in the middle of the unholy cat's cradle. After meeting Melanie, I half expected Lolth to come crawling out of the shadows.

“Jean-Claude!” A woman greeted my escort with a smile so false and wide it exposed the points of her teeth. Her pristine lace, and only lace, dress she wore matched the bleached linen robes of the man standing at her side. A matched pair, almost like Richard and his bodyguards – or, more likely, Jean-Claude and Damien. She was no Lara. Her swordsman could have been carved from marble, but for his eyes.

They tracked me like a cat did an insect.

I had thought I'd gotten over it, gone through all five stages, but I was hit by sudden sharp longing for home. I may have jokingly called myself Jean-Claude's white knight, but I missed my own something fierce. I could easily imagine Michael walking around the room like the world's most reluctant night light. Faith like his doesn't exactly have an off switch.

Jean-Claude returned Yvette's greeting, something flowery yet blunt as he hoped she enjoyed Asher as much he himself enjoyed her, and he guided me to my chair like a good master his human servant. Sit! Good boy! Play undead! The runes on my staff started a slow smolder as I took my seat.

It was an oddly cushy seat. JC spared no expense, apparently.

Above us, bound suspended among the dueling colors like a nest in a tree, was a naked woman. With one leg pressed to her torso and the other stretched to expose the soft, pale skin of her inner thigh, she appeared so much a macabre ballerina floating above the dining table that was her shibari* stage. Her heart still beat, though, as I watched a bare breast subtly move with each heartbeat. I couldn't know if I knew her or not; her arms contorted about her head in a mask of flesh and rope.

I could see there were 'nests' scattered erratically throughout the room, now that I knew what to look for. Men. Women. Some too small to be either.

My jaw ached. A delicate finger traced along it. “Patience.” The word was unheard by all but me. I thought.

“Do you like it?” A vampire I recognized using body language I did not asked me with a lazy, confident smirk. Willie's girlfriend, and one of my best undead informants, perched in the lap of a man equally unknown. I could make an educated guess. Not!Hannah continued and gestured with nails lacquered a wet-black to match the too tight dress she wore. “Musette and Yvette worked so hard decorating for Jean-Claude's little animator.”

I didn't need my magic to sense the rotting, dead thing hidden beneath the silver serving dish sitting innocently below the suspended woman. The smell was identifier enough. The hand at my jaw became a light, soothing pressure trailing down my arm as Lash stalked away from me.

“Et t'was nothing, Traveler.” Musette tittered, and there was a dissonance in the way her blonde curls bounced when she lifted her hand to her face, little finger extended. Musette, I recalled, preferred _fresher_ blood. “Dear Angelito and I merely 'ung ze garlands. Yvette und sweet Warrick found ze pah-tee favors.”

Bile tickled the back of my throat. I was going to puke, and then I was going to kill every last one of them. I could feel the bones in the tureens. The meat. Just a flex of will and the creatures within would leap out and go for their throats. Jean-Claude's fingertips traced the path Lash's had gone. A stroke that accompanied the echo of her word in his eyes.

I breathed, mindful of the mortals dangling above us. I rifled through my duster pocket, brushing aside the speed loaders and loose bullets, until I found my salvation. I knocked the packet of spearmint against the table with the practice of an addict and a stick of gum lifted like a lone sentinel.

“As... unique as the décor is I must ask where such favors were found.” JC's voice was measured, his gaze pointedly not following my own as I chewed as obnoxiously as possible. I considered offering a stick to Richard, his nose had to be screaming at him, but then discarded the idea. With my luck Bitchface McRotterson would want to know if I had enough to share with the whole class. “It was my understanding that with the Traveler present your party need not hunt in my territory, and with American legalities being what they are missing young can draw a certain amount of attention.”

Lash 'hmmed'. Something about JC's phrasing hit a nerve with the Council, but hell if I knew what.

“They have not been fed upon, not without your leave, oh Master of the City.” Asher, this time, a single empty seat on each side of him and a cigarette dangling between ring and middle finger. His shirt gaped, the scars on display and his hair falling back as he blew smoke at the suspended woman.

“We obeyed the laws. We promised them a party, they agreed to come.” Yvette rolled her shoulders as she spoke, and it should have been sensuous, but instead the joints popped in jerky movements.

“Did they really?” Richard's voice rumbled. “Or did you roll them first?”

“Why, Jean-Claude, your beast speaks! I 'ad heard your servant 'twas mad, uncontrollable, but for ton loup to be so bold! 'Tis a pity Padma declined to come, 'e would teach 'ze animals 'dere place. If you cannot keep them, how do you expect to keep this city?”

“How,” The Traveler spoke with a purr as the man he perched upon lifted Hannah's breast free from the dress and kissed her neck. I picked at the well of my gathered magic, trying not to look as a moan escaped the normally demure vampire's mouth. An arm reached up and gripped the dark brown mane of the man. I couldn't recall his name, but I knew him to be to the Traveler what I was to Jean-Claude. “Indeed. What cat's paw did you use, little master? We know you. We have _seen_ and _touched_ every dark stain, every _crevasse_ , and no matter how much you may have grown away from Belle Morte's loving shadow Oliver would have crushed you like an avalanche.”

“'Tis true.” JC conceded, eyes hooded. “I was no match for the Earthmover, and so wisdom demands I decline his seat, but ma petite is quite mad in her own way and insanity has a certain quality. She struck him down as he was distracted with attempting to drive a stake through my own heart.”

“'Vell? What does le petite belle have to say? I cahn see ze fire in 'er. Would you share ze story of ze Earthmover, or Nikoloas' deaths, Ah-ni-ta? Ah, non. Asher tells us you prefer 'Arriet.” Her face was soft, almost heart shaped. They knives at our empty place settings were too sharp and straight for a dinner. There were twelve people scattered above us, bodies twisted into strange art. I blew a bubble and popped it.

“Lady,” I said with a drawl, slowly slurping up the deflated gum. “I'm here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And you better pray I don't run out of bubblegum.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, face pinched, before a throaty laugh burst from blood red lips. Lash stalked the table, a steady commentary in my ear as JC took the reigns for our half of the negotiations. The Traveler's knight looked up from his molestation's of Hannah's body only long enough to drop the bomb that was Meng Die's failed attempt at a coup in San Angelo, their location before snaking their way to St. Louis, and if perhaps she was the true power behind the throne. Some of the attending wererats snickered.

Meng Die herself merely propped her feet on the table and arched her back, displaying her chest. “Do not presume to know my mind, _servant_.” Belatedly, it hit me just how closely the colors of her outfit mirrored Jean-Claude's. Not a perfect match, but a statement of alliance.

It was a soup of dead rats hidden in the serving bowl before Musette. The boiled bones of a gray wolf lay like a stuffed pig on the main serving dish in the center of the table. I had a kitten. Other creatures in a line of death down the table. Useless, mostly, except for a swarming distraction. Not that I would need one. Patience, Lash argued, and for once I agreed. Death, wind... earth? I was a bit better at the last than before, it seemed a natural byproduct of the practice of zombie raising, but I wasn't confident in pulling anything off on the fly.

I focused on my magic as the conversation flowed around me. The runes on my staff continued to glimmer, one by one, drinking my anger and frustration.

 _Empty night_ , vampires could talk. My attention waned from the sniping, the posturing, the gods damned politics. The little hints at horrors best left to the forgotten corners of the mind. Imagined slights, simply because JC refused to give them permission to hunt, or a cart blanche play card for rape. Though, to be fair it was Richard who point-blank denied that request of his wolves. Because what was Jean-Claude's was Belle's and what was Richard's was Jean-Claude's. Such is vampire law. Or something.

Richard pointed out, with a finger that grew a two inch long claw, that he was not a vampire and if Yvette was that hard up for some sex it sounded like a personal problem rather than any obligation of Jean-Claude's. That pissed her off, and the man behind her bristled, the blade he'd been holding suddenly emerging from the length of his robes like Duncan fucking Macleod pulling a katana. She raised a hand to still him, her gaze turning to insult Jean-Claude for failing his duties as a host _and_ one of the Beautiful Death's line.

Sword-boy, Warrick, had never glanced at Richard. He only watched me. Cornflower eyes vibrant as the skin around them pulled tight.

“Perhaps,” Musette said, her voice and accent shifting as blue eyes were swallowed by burning brown. “Our dear Jean-Claude has forgotten the lessons of the Court. Hmm?”

Musette stood, her walk the sensuous hip roll of a runway model. Magic rolled off her in a wave of hyacinth and honeysuckle scented air that was nearly as cloying as the rot and decay. Jean-Claude's back was straight, his muscles tense. A bloom of pink rose to his cheeks. “Belle Morte.”

Musette's skin was white, her blonde curls somehow growing darker with each step she took toward us. I'd thought she was a dark doll, but in truth she was a fallen goddess. I stood to kneel and beg-

Cold, cold water poured through my veins. Fingernails dug into my face and I stared into Lash's eyes, the myriad of colors. Her mouth moving, the same word, over and over. Something low in my body _tingled_.

What?

“Or,” Musette was saying, her head tilted as she eyed my shaking shoulders and white knuckles. There was blood under my nails. I had to reaffirm my grip on my staff before I dropped it. “Perhaps she is truly mad. A pity.”

“Get out.” I growled, looking at the wetness of her lips and all too aware of the ardor she'd awoken between my legs. I felt myself looking out of my face, the distant box of my mind he lived in having shattered at Belle Morte's touch. “Get the fuck out of my head, out of Musette, and while you are at it take the fucking Traveler with you!”

“How rude. Even the mad must have manners. I will teach you to beg, little necromancer. I will teach you to scream my name.” Wind and flower petals brushed my cheek, my neck. Jean-Claude was standing now, too, his fear swamped by anger as me moved to put himself between us. He may have been Master of the City, but as far as they were concerned they were the Masters of the Universe.

I brought my staff forward, every last rune blazing like embers, and fell to one knee as I stuck the butt against the floor. " _Ventas._ ” My whisper was carried by the wind that exploded out, my duster billowing while silver covers buffeted about the room. Plates and forks flying. Vampires locking themselves in place as the wind of my Will cleared the air. Harmless.

Glowing eyes stared at me. Faces blank. Considering.

“Witch.” The quiet knight hissed from where he was lowering the arm he'd raised in guard. His voice gradually increased in volume as the muscles on his neck, his face, swelled and stretched the skin covering them. “Consort to demons! I can smell the sulfur from here!”

He lunged, the table no bar to his attack.

“Warrick!”

Steel met staff, and sparks flew. A staff is a multipurpose tool as important to a wizard as it is iconic. When first coming to this world I'd been without any of my tools, lost in the transition. No staff, no bracelet, not even a single force ring to my name. Just a machete and a center of balance switch that had people asking if I'd hit my head on a tombstone. Normally, wood was no match for a sword and with the force that the now identified Warrick put behind his down stroke under normal circumstance it would have cleaved right through and into my chest cavity.

With how difficult it was in the world to acquire materials I had invested far more time and effort into my staff than I once did. More than a general tool to focus and refine my spellcraft, I'd layered and coiled runes and spells within the wood itself to be released on command not unlike my old force rings. Instead of kinetic power, however, in a world populated by legal citizens who shrugged off bullets and could survive having their lungs pulped I'd put my physics knowledge to work.

Energy is not created or destroyed, merely changes form. Every time I walked with my staff, clanged or swung the black walnut, a little bit of that energy was stored away and transformed by the latent ritual laid down in the painstakingly etched carvings. Warrick was a vampire. Him being stronger than me was obvious. Even with the boost JC's vampire marks gave me the knight was probably faster, with centuries to perfect his swordsmanship. I could barely hold my own against Murphy, and that was when I'd been the one with the height advantage. The less said about my spars with Michael, the actual swordsman, the better.

So I cheated.

“ _Fulminos.”_ Lightning lashed out, and rather than the general wave I'd originally intended when carving my staff electricity ground into the sword pressing against the walnut. The blond vampire was thrown away, crashing against the solid table with a snap before momentum carried him over to the bone and gristle littered floor beyond. His hand smoked where flesh met red-hot steel, grip twitching.

“Warrick! How dare you-.” Yvette was hissing, and I vaguely remembered a confrontation in hill-billy vampire land where being attacked was winning, or it was until I found the faery under the hill and let it out. She bared bloody teeth and her militant manservant coughed blood, curling around his middle as _chunks_ fell from his mouth. “-Morte d'Amor shall hear of this child's obsession. You shall be kept a puddle of vomit and blood for this, this disobedience, but I will allow you your eyes so that-”

“NO!” Warrick shouted with a final guttural cough of lung. When he stood, bones snapping back into place, the vampire knight no longer had eyes, but literal flames dancing in the sockets. He used his sword as a cane, the metal hissing as it came in contact with the puddle of sick. “I failed before, my mistress seduced me from my calling, from his most holy cause... but I see now. I feel His light, His warmth, His purpose.”

“Oh, Hells...” I muttered as everyone turned their gaze to the vampire who was now on fire. And somehow not burning.

“He is a born pyromancer, my Host.” Lash sighed. “The curse usually subsumes any human talents to fuel itself. This is most ill-timing.”

“I will not be swayed again, Yvette. My Lord has made me a Master for his Purpose. I shall not again be tricked by lust and beauty!” Flames crept along Warrick's sword and he moved, one hand casting out in a pimp slap that seared Yvette's skin when she attempted to grapple with him, her suddenly slick rotting arms providing a limited armor against his heat.

I ducked a jet of flame as Warrick closed, the enraged undead shedding fire like a duck did water. An irrational spike of irritation went through me as I threaded my staff through the legs of a chair and hurled it at him. A temporary distraction at best. The fire was climbing, feeding on detritus and rope and Hannah's screams as her body was hers again but hers in the middle of a warzone.

Richard's was a mess of muscle and fur, but I couldn't see more than that beyond the flames. My world was Warrick, Warrick and fire as salt burned my eyes and each block made my joints ache and my breath catch. I missed a parry that was caught by my enchanted duster, and let the momentum of the strike carry me away for a brief respite as my assailant came to terms with my not sliced status. JC was right. Madness had a quality all its own. I'd have a bruise there for weeks.

“Harry!” Speak of the devil. Warrick kicked what little air I'd managed to keep from my lungs, but before he could cut off my head a rapier intercepted his own flaming blade, catching it at the cross guard and forcing Warrick to retreat several steps before renewing his attack with his new opponent.

I dragged myself away, coughing, and mounted the splintered table, using it as springboard to the air, to the woman just now beginning to struggle with awareness. Gripping my staff at the center, I twirled it like a baton, my voice layered as I released the spell I'd spent the whole of the 'dinner' weaving. “ _Vento falcifer!_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Kinbaku is probably more accurate but I like the alliteration that Shibari makes. Meh.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My muse is finally sated, as this chapter was the whole reason I continued Guilt Free Pleasures. FIRE FIRE EVERYWHERE!!! I suggest [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRgPj35FZS4) mood music for the chapter.

In hindsight, unleashing the equivalent to a miniature storm of swords had probably not been the best choice, even if it was above most people's heads. Blades of air rippled out from the ends of my staff, twisting and turning in the air, as sharp as my mind could imagine them. Wind magic was delicate work to start with, and figuring the angles, the geometry of my task without hitting the hostages -because that is what they were, voluntary or no- was not something I was going to let go to waste. With Warrick doing his best impression of, well, _me_ from once-upon-a-time getting the mortal men and women down only became more urgent.

I was not gentle.

I didn't have the time to be gentle.

Compressed and sharpened air sliced through rope and stone alike, the naked woman and others falling from the red-blue web like overripe fruit. Ember and ash and raw supernatural flame rushed to fill the void left by their passage. I caught my staff in my left hand as I landed in a defensive crouch, shielding my face in the bend of my elbow as I drew my revolver with my right.

A stalactite crashed down a few feet to my left, shattering and peppering my coat in mineral fragments. Smoke and sweat stung my eyes and as far as I could tell it was as though everyone had lost their minds. Yvette was screeching where she rolled on the ground trying and failing to put out the burning fragments of rope that had fallen upon her like Hephaestus' own net, stuck as they were in the goop of her rot. High-pitched chattering as man sized rats, and one tiger, clawed at each other on their way for the door that wasn't opening. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve at the last sight, but even with the occasional lick of flame obscuring my view the tiger was still blue. _Neon_ blue.

Richard in his thankfully normal coloring rushed the pack of panicking peons like the world's angriest pony. The heavy oaken doors had about as much chance against him as they did against the Kool-Aid man; not that Jamil or Shang-Da let anyone else enjoy the sudden influx of fresh air. The important thing was we had a relatively clear exit, now, not that the fresh air was also helping the fire. I looked around for the rest of my party members.

Musette was backed up against a wall, one arm out and shielding both her Servant and the Traveler's as a steady pulse of sickly sweet air diverted the flames. There was a man in the path of that diversion. His scream was muffled, but I felt it in my bones, in the phantom pain of sympathy that shot through a hand no longer scarred.

My magic, no longer constrained by concentration, crawled over my flushed skin in cold tendrils before inching toward beacons of the scattered dead. I straightened from my crouch, half turning with my staff and sighting down the revolver all in the same motion. A wet, red flower bloomed on the wall behind Musette. I didn't wait around to see her earthy eyes narrow in disgust, or the misshapen collection of tiny corpses that rose and fumbled, instinctively, toward the nearest source of blood.

“Jean-Claude!” I yelled, coughed, and yelled again as I pulled the naked woman from where she had landed, shivering. She alternated between swatting at my face and clutching at my coat. I was tempted to give it to her, and not for modesty's sake. Sweat was dripping into my eyes as I tried to see past the inferno that had sprung up between me and my vampire.

JC's head swiveled toward me as he leaned to the side to avoid a thrust that ended up being a feint, only to turn his lean into a twist that allowed Damien to rush the sudden opening in Warrick's guard. Not that it helped much. Damien backpedaled as a fire sparked into a shield where his sword would have struck, green eyes wide and fangs bared. Oddly, I got the impression he was happy. They both were.

“My host,” Lash's voice, soft. “We must escape. _Now._ ”

Alone, Warrick would have crushed them. Together, Jean-Claude and Damien stood a marginal chance. It was a chance that shrunk every second the fight continued; because it wasn't just Warrick's sword they had to worry about. It was the flames, and time. As the pyromancer fought he conjured whips that struck out, balls of flame that exploded, and I very much noticed few pools of super-heated rock that bubbled in that area. My vampires were flagging. For all their skill, supernatural speed and reflexes were the only thing saving them.

I gathered my magic, the chill of it settling in the pit of my stomach like an anchor, and with the terrified woman next to me I fed it my anger. We moved slowly, inching away from the heat that crawled even as I reached toward it with my Will. Magic was akin to science, and though I hadn't tried this particular juggling of exothermic and endothermic processes in quite some time it shouldn't have been any harder than riding a bike.

Lamenting the fact that I did not have three arms, I returned my gun to it's pocket and withdrew the trigger lighter from the small of my back. The woman hit me again. I shook her off, growling, and ignited the tip with a squeeze. The tiny yellow glow was oddly cheerful against the angry inferno dancing around us. Training wheels at the ready, I pointed the lighter at no one I cared about and whispered, “ _Infriga_.”

My intent had been to draw the heat from the flames, extinguishing them and leaving a path of frost with which JC and Damien could use to retreat safely.

Instead, the lighter exploded in my hand after successfully siphoning only a tiny dribble of heat.

I barely had time to shake out the shattered remains. As I bit my lower lip to muffle curses Warrick snarled and turned to glare at me even as he thrust an open palm toward Damien. The red head barely had time to raise his arms in defense of his head as a massive fireball wider than a person enveloped him. An explosion of super-heated air momentarily cleared the space, my own hair flying wildly about my face and hampering my vision in the eddies of wind. There was no Damien. No bones; not even ashes. The wall behind was burned and cracked.

“No...” I breathed, the monster inside me baying, clawing at my fists, gnawing at my spine. Telling me to _go_. Of course he would know I was trying something. Lash had told me he was a natural pyromancer; it followed he could sense -see- to some extent through the flames. With every square foot of cinders he increased his battlefield awareness. Warrick had felt my spell begin to leech his supernatural fire and, somehow, reversed it.

“My host... I am so sorry...”

He'd taken the power I'd used to create the spell and channeled it to kill Damien. Stupid, prideful, Damien with his money-green eyes and silly sword fetish and... and...

My perceptions had slowed. My hand was bleeding, and this time I was the one smelling sulfur. If I used wind it would just fan the flames, like before. Ice was useless. Force was useless. The dead would crisp before they so much as scratched him. The only thing I had left was the fire I'd lost my affinity for. Without the lighter to give me a starting spark I couldn't so much as light a candle, and chances were attempting to manipulate Warrick's flame would end in an even worse failure.

I felt cool, bare skin pressing against my back as though I wasn't wearing a leather duster. Lash wrapped one arm beneath my breasts, her lips at my neck, and the other arm stretched atop my own. The Fallen's hand curled around my wounded one, blood and lighter fluid mixing. “...I _am_ sorry, Harry. This is all I can do.”

I smelt rather than saw the flame-edged sword sheer through my hair as I dodge-rolled, my magic flaring in response to the boost Lash had gifted me. Without the old Viking attacking when his master defended, Warrick blew through Jean-Claude's guard and back to me. “Jean-Claude!” I screamed, bones rattling, pushing the naked woman at him with a pulse of force magic. He caught the panicking victim, tossed her over one shoulder like a rolled up carpet, and spared me one last unreadable look.

I led with my staff, sweeping it along the ground through soot and flame, my magic a cold, burning shield only a second behind. Warrick jumped over my staff and snapped a red-white burning whip at my throat. I raised my right arm, the coppery tang of blood filing my mouth as I bit straight through my lip at the searing pain. I pulled, almost fell backward and forced him to follow, eyes watering. Fire and Death met, mingled, and he brought his ruined blade down so fast I nearly missed blocking it.

“You stink of hell.” He whispered, bearing down on me, my staff pressing into my body as the sword pressed into it. Runes sparked and fizzled as the fire burned. At least I didn't have to worry about sweat in my eyes anymore. As close as we were, I couldn't not feel the ball of cool death buried under all the burning heat. It resonated within me, with my own power, and I knew Warrick for a dead thing. It is strange, the difference between knowing something and understanding it. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. In the same way all vampires are dead but not all dead are vampires. The magic that infused Anita's, that infused _my_ being, that bubbled out and begged to be used was death.

Lips, pink and perfect, parted to show gleaming teeth. They were not my lips, my teeth, but I felt the motion as if they were.

“Anything-” I huffed, my own eyes burning as I stared at the increasing confusion on Warrick's features while I used the close quarters to truly dissect and analyze his power; the backdoor that was himself wide open to magical perusal. “-you can do. I CAN DO BETTER!”

I punched his side with a fist wreathed in Hellfire. It hurt. The flame whip Warrick had ensnared my unencumbered arm with had slowly cooked through the protections on my duster, fusing leather to skin and the movement necessary to throw the punch was like taking a flaying knife to my own arm. My knuckles reacted as though I'd just punched concrete.

But even if Warrick was immune to his own fire, he had no defenses against the Forces of Hell™.

Where his fire was like a particularly precocious girl scout pushing her cookies for money, mine was a gangster out of a John Woo flick cornering you in an alley. The vampire moved away, trying to pat out the growing hole in his blackening robes where flesh bubbled. Then, we danced.

Or, that was what I'd call it if I was trying to be poetic. It was more akin to a pool side water fight, if you replace the water with fire and pool with underground dungeon. My blood was pumping in my ears a fast bass, my hand was literally inflamed as I carefully fueled the sick yellow, almost white fire with my own fat stores, and yet I felt more myself now than I had in nearly a year.

Yet, I had one very important weakness Warrick did not share. I still needed to breathe, and while I could keep myself from immolation with quick feet our combined fires rapidly ate at what little oxygen remained in the room.

Warrick tossed aside his blade, the metal finally giving out under the constant abuse he had been putting it through, and I ran. Hellfire swirled around me like paint, and I the artist. It was both sword and shield for me, passively consuming and converting the vampire's fire with every focused attack. I barreled though the splintered door, absently noticing we two had been the only ones left in the chamber, with Warrick hot on my heels.

He cast a spear of flame, I saw it coming from the ring of my own looping behind me, and planting my staff to use as a pivot and anchor point.  Turning with my momentum I ran a few steps along a bullet filled wall. Bullets? The spear sailed along the hall I had been formerly running to light up a tapestry that had been knocked askew. I gestured upward with a grand sweep of my arm, the word _pyrofuego_ bright in my mind, and a thin sickle of hazy white that stretched from floor to ceiling burnt shallow trails through the stone. It was slow enough Warrick easily side-stepped the attack and responded with a cyclone.

I sacrificed my duster before it could dissolve into ash with me in it, and tripped over a corpse.

Fire sailed overhead, this time shaped like kamikaze butterflies, and I belly-crawled around a corner. I couldn't feel my hand anymore. Checking it, the appendage was little more than too-shiny skin stretched over bone. Kinda like how vampires looked after being starved. But just my hand.

“Who would dare-?!” A voice I recognized asked in time to the sudden weight on my back. My ribs screamed unhelpfully. A foot stomped down on my wrist, I could see charred pant cuffs as I wheezed, and kicked my staff away. “Jean-Claude's idiot savant. Perhaps we can salvage something from this fiasco.”

“Step away from the She-Demon, Balthasar, less she taint you with her foul magics.” Warrick had caught up, minus an arm. There was nothing but a stub of charcoal below his right elbow. The fingers on his left were incense sticks. Part of his chest resembled so much of a burned marshmallow. Butterflies of bright blue flame danced around his head.

The human wasn't impressed, and despite the still bleeding scratches on his hands and the arm that hung like a dead weight he still managed to look down his nose at the blond. “ _You_ are the idiot that let the necromancer copy your power. Retreat, Warrick, lick your wounds and mayhaps we won't _all_ face the Nightmare Queen's disappointment. The Traveler has decided-”

“God. Fucking. DAMMIT!” I coughed out, gathering my magic and pushing off the ground to unseat the arrogant bastard using me as a doormat. “I AM NOT A STARS CURSED NECROMANCER!!!”

Hellfire pulsed out from me in waves, riding my radiating anger. Necromancer this. Necromancer that. Yes, I was good at death magic. Nevermind that I made wind, or called fire, or went through more light bulbs than most glass-eating circus acts all anyone cared about was the necromancy. The Traveler was talking, Warrick was talking, the weresomething that was hauling a fancy leather trunk behind him was talking, but I had hit that thin line that separated caring from not and charged straight through it.

“I AM A WIZARD!!! _Forzare!_ ”

I punched the air, and the force I'd messily imbued into the strike carried over to the Traveler's human servant and knocked him down. Butterflies descended, but I summoned up a shield strengthened with Hellfire and they dissolved into cerulean sparks as I advanced on the shameful excuse for a human being. The tanned man spat a glob of blood and looked up at me.

I looked back.

I fell into pools of dark chocolate. He was old, I now knew, he'd walked the world for six hundred years and enjoyed every minute of it. Born the fourth son of a second son, he had stood to inherit nothing. It had made him bitter. He took it out on the servants, on the peasants, on anyone he could get away with.

I walked through dank corridors of earth. Skeletal, screaming people bound by roots reached out, pleading. Even starving, they looked like Balthasar. In the center was a tree, an ash, bearing the man's contented countenance as his roots strangled his family. Countless puppets dangled from the branches in place of leaves.

A blink, and there was again smoke in the air instead of wet earth. I saw fear on his face in place of contentment. A wizard's soulgaze goes both ways. For not the first time I wondered what he had seen in mine. I continued staring into those terrified brown eyes, mentally plucking the connection I'd found within, and squeezed his thigh with my ruined hand.

“ _Burn._ ”

Balthasar was to the Traveler what I was to Jean-Claude. As the vampires put it; my voice was his voice. My hand his hand. That connection was too deep for anything but death itself to break and thaumaturgy was one of my favorite forms of magic. Usually I only employed it for tracking or finding things, but now? My everything hurt. I stumbled away as Hellfire consumed the squirming, screaming man.

Fuck the Traveler.

Wherever he was.

Warrick's mouth was red, like punch. The werething, a cat I now saw, was dead with its throat ripped out. Freshly fed, the vampire was moving more smoothly, purposefully, and I'd been run ragged. Why didn't I have any health potions? Because I sucked at any form of healing magic, that was why, it was true when I had a dick and it remained true now that I didn't.

“Lash?” I croaked. There was a sound of wooden beams splintering overhead.

“I am here, my host.” She whispered.

Warrick raised his remaining arm, the fingers swelling with new-grown flesh as I gathered my own flagging energies, a swell of sparks slowly grew into a cannon ball sized concentration of flames. A small sun, air wavered around it like a worn veil.

I waved off Lash's offer to deaden the pain, instead going to my knees as everything hit me at once. The pain was all I had left, and gritting my teeth I fed it into my magic like the last of the kindling during a blizzard. Cold filled me up inside, counterpoint to the conflagration.

Hail Mab, full of Cruelty. Winter is with thee.

“Pray for us sinners.” My cracked lips quirked as I raised my good left hand, pointing. Three shaking fingers curled inward, thumb up, I mimed shooting a gun as a ball of purest blue flew towards me. _Arctis._ Breath exited my lungs as though pulled along with my magic, a streak of sub-zero ice slipping right under the fireball, and I collapsed face-first to the floor. My shoulder blistered from the passing heat, hair smoldering.

Above me, something gave out, and I screamed soundlessly as wood and rubble pinned me to the floor.

I could only take shallow breaths, and my vision began to fog. Little black specs zipping around like gnats. I felt a woman's hand on my forehead, as if brushing back my bangs, the pain receding enough to think. Blood was rolling toward me, black in the flickering light.

Warrick wasn't moving, a puppet with his strings cut.

I wasn't moving. There was slick on my leg, and an intermittent throb of familiar impalement.

“...I think I love you.” I whispered, closing my eyes as the inferno faded to background noise. I wondered if I'd burn or suffocate first.

I'd done the right thing.  Not the smartest.  Just right.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Harry has a concussion, the dead walk, and Jean-Claude is a sly bastard.

Anchored to the earth, I floated.

Fire danced around me, on top of me, and in the flickering I saw flashes of Murphy's blonde hair, a flick of Morgan's steel gaze, judging. The pattern of golden and black spots that liked to rub against my legs, achingly familiar. Though no longer fueled by dueling pyromaniacs, the heat crept ever closer. My eyes watered, and I retreated inward, thoughts floating as aimless as the rest of me.

_Harry..._

Shapes in the flames merged, split, could see so many things, even blurred as they were through the salt.

_Harry..._

I closed my eyes, held onto the single most lovely thing I had ever seen and could never forget. In my darkest moments, when I worried the magic of universe would erase everything I was to fit in the pigeon hole it had crafted for me, I closed my eyes and called up the image that had burned into my psyche.

Murph.

Golden nimbus, a gun that was a sword.

Everything I had ever wanted to be, she _was_. Tiny, but fierce.

_Harry..._

The weight of the rubble pressed down, breath came in tight little gasps searing the delicate flesh of my lungs. I held that image in my mind as light and shadow battled for my attention.

The darkness won...

…

My chest expanded, fully expanded, and awareness returned to me like a skittish horse. I hissed, impaled leg catching as something cold and wet tugged my limp body. I couldn't move much, but I let my head roll and rubbed a cheek against a damp... leg? Lap?

“Anita... Harriet. Harriet, you must stay awake. _Stay with me_.” Thomas? Why was he... oh. I could smell shriveled hair. It was a very distinctive smell. Was he going to fix my hair?

“...best brother...” I muttered into Thomas' leg. A nap. I wanted a nap. He could shampoo my hair and I could nap.

“Harriet, please!” Cold hands gripped my chin, turned my head. Squeezed ever so slightly and my mouth fell open.

A woman's voice, exhausted, whispered from the depths of my skull, “My host, we are _dying_.”

Cold, cold in comparison to the rest of the room, spilled across my face. It dripped, and I sputtered. Words caressed my throat as the hand held my head in place. Bitter pennies trickled into my mouth. I coughed, swallowed, shivered.

For a moment, I thought my heart would exploded out of my chest. A tide of blue rolled in, and carried me with it. I saw... things. I felt hunger. My tongue slipped out, tracing my lips and probing for any spare drops.

I opened my eyes. It wasn't Thomas. Of course it wasn't Thomas.

Jean-Claude tossed his head back, throat moving as he swallowed down the glimmering silver of an escape potion. The arm around my shoulders tightened like a vice as he pulled me closer to his chest.

For an instant I had no weight at all, and then the we exploded.

* * *

I hadn't been the one to drink the potion, so I was not the one in control of our journey. For a given value of control: the nature of the magic meant JC could pick a direction- namely away- but not the route. We went sideways, intangible and impossibly quick, before juking upwards. One moment we had been entwined with the flames and next we hovered in the air above the burning circus like two lovestruck ghosts. I could see the city spread out below us, with the Mississippi a promising ribbon of moonlight only a few blocks from the bonfire that was Jean-Claude's place of power. Well, former place of power.

A heartbeat later, and a rapid drop that caused my stomach to press into my lungs, saw JC and I crashing down on the hood of a cop car. Metal groaned beneath us as we materialized in safety. I groaned with it.

“Jesus Christ!” A man in a tale-tale trench coat shouted as he spun around, Glock coming up to point at us.

“No.” I giggled, wiping upchucked blood and bile off of my face. I stared at my hand for a moment, and then sneakily cleaned my puke covered palm on my rescuer's coat while pretending to pat it. No amount of dry cleaning was going to save the brocade, anyway. “ _Jean-Claude_.”

“Holy fucking fuck.” The man, a Detective Zebrowski, holstered his gun and marched toward us, the strobe lights of police cruisers making his normally relaxed visage menacing. As JC inched us off the car, I noted the presence of emergency responders mingling in the street with partially shifted misanthropes and vampires. I blinked blood from my eyes and tried to focus on who I thought was Willie holding Hannah. She appeared to be clutching at him and crying, her make up running, while he bared fangs at some poor uniformed schmuck. Zebrowski dragged my attention back to him. “Anita, what the fuck happened?”

“Ma petite cannot answer that question, _Detective_.” Jean-Claude spat the words, his arms supporting me like a steel cage. Pressed against his length, I sighed in pleasure as sopping, soft fabric soothed my over heated skin.  Dimly, I was aware of another relaxed sigh that only I could hear. Dark hair had come free of the loose pony tail it had been in, hanging around glowing eyes like distressed vines.

The cross pin on Zebrowski's tie lit up like the little phosphorescent stars used to decorate kid's rooms. The man rocked back on his heels, hand falling to rest lightly on his holster, and I could feel the tension in the air like a heavy fog. I coughed, hacking, and Zebrowski's hard gaze softened as it focused on me.

“This isn't over, _oh_ _Master_.” Salt-and-pepper warned before detaching the radio on his belt and requesting medical help. A woman in the distinct black and yellow of a fire-fighter pushed through the crowd while shouting into a radio of her own. I caught some reference to bugs as she blew past. Weird. Together, JC and I stumbled to meet the paramedics half-way.

I sat, and was promptly told to lay down while a bag was placed under my legs to elevate them. I didn't want a blanket. I had just escaped an oven, and was still operating on the instinct that Belle had stupidly unlocked, so with a proprietary growl I dragged JC down with me. Wet and cool, his presence was a balm to my liberally blistered skin. My magic may have been running on nothing but hallucinogenic fumes, but it kindled against him, resonating with the living dead.

Plastic brushed against my face and blessedly pure, smoke free air entered my oxygen starved body. I melted into the padding of the stretcher, barely registering the needle a paramedic slid under my skin. I couldn't see any stars with all the light pollution, but it was nice to lay back and relax for a few minutes. Jean-Claude was speaking with the medics as one dabbed at my face and exposed shoulder with a cotton press smothered in some disinfectant; or maybe it was a numbing agent, whatever it was it helped.

“...and that's aside from the first and second degree burns. She needs an actual hospital!”

“Blake.” A softer, yet somehow louder voice cut through the technobabble. I raised my head, and the bizzaro lovechild of Marcone and Morgan was looking down at me with a pained expression. Sergeant Storr of the RPT was both tall and broad, with a chip on his shoulder that was more akin to a war axe that he'd occasionally wield like a berserkr of old. I tried to avoid triggering his rage, partly out of respect for someone who basically had Murphy's job but mostly out of my desire to not see the inside of a jail cell.

I was fairly certain I could talk my way out, but most of my adulthood had been spent avoiding authority figures like Storr. It was a hard habit to shake.

A soft clink of metal drew my attention to the handcuffs -steel with a silver inlay of alternating Crosses, Shield's of David, and the iconic Crescent and Star- that were connecting Jean-Claude to my stretcher. When had that happened? It was a little embarrassing to see. I hadn't thought Storr would actually take me up on the idea, but the cuffs while an initial expense were easier to lug around than the traditional silver forged cross-wrapped chains.

Still, though... what the hell had JC done while I was fighting Warrick? Hadn't there been bullet holes in the wall? Why? Where had they even come from? Vampires didn't even use guns! It was like they were allergic to firearms!

“...Hi, Doll fa-ph.” I tried to give a jaunty wave, but it was more like a half-dead flop. My voice was a croak.

“Is she able to answer questions?” Sergeant Storr asked my paramedic. She was looking at my crispy arm like it had personally insulted her.

“She's on got a concussion, I doubt you would get anything coherent. And she needs a hospital, not an interrogation. Can you _please_ let us leave?”

“The vampire's been accused of illegal power use, I've got a transport being prepped-”

“And according to _the vampire_ he's the only thing preventing her from going into shock.”

“So he admits to Rolling our Executioner-”

“STOP IT!” I lurched up, or tried to, JC was holding me down. Apparently, I had actually managed to break a rib and it was dangerously close to puncturing my lungs. Ow. What followed was an awkward series of positions for all involved. I struggled on, regardless. “Stop fighting! This is how the terrorists win!”

“...terrorists?” Storr, wonderfully looming, biased Storr flipped open his notepad.

“Ma petite is injured, she does not know what she is saying.” Jean-Claude spoke aloud even as I heard his french tones whispering something completely different in my brain like a god damned ventriloquist, “Do not mention the Council. Secrecy is our highest law, to break it is treason. They will send not mere Hands, Harry, but Swords.”

The lady paramedic helpfully adjusted the elastic band so my oxygen mask wouldn't fall off again. I bared bloody teeth at them. I think that might have been the smoke inhalation that was mentioned. The taste was salt and metal. “International Vampire Terrorists. They don't like how the good 'ole US of A made them legal, so they came to fuck shit up. They're terrifying, Storr! Terrorists! I had to do... something! To stop them!”

I spoke, throat shredding further with each word, countless eyes staring at me. Some in awe. A few in amusement. That was normal. Most in horror. Even more normal. My eyes started tearing up again as a familiar mane of red approached, and whispered with Jean-Claude as my words started slurring together. Jean-Claude's cuffs were unlocked from the bed rail as they loaded and locked my stretcher into the ambulance.

The fire department wasn't pressing charges, but a stuttering uniform informed us JC was still going to be fined for Compelling them into hitting him full spray with the hose. And destruction of city property.

The fuck was he doing on a slip-n-slide?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was a bit drunk writing the second half of this chapter. Wine is the only over-the-counter medication that stops the cramps for me. I had my roommate read over it, and she laughed at me and fixed a few things that only made sense to drunk-me. Though, I think it turned out pretty good despite the deleted ice picks and werebees.


	9. JC I

The Master of St. Louis listened, countenance the unsettling void of expression he'd perfected over the centuries. After everything was done and the bodies counted, he'd only lost two of his Kiss. _Two_. Gretchen, trapped as she was in the coffin-

_Darkness. Pain. Panic. Fingernails that should have carved wood breaking off and bleeding, blood, it smelled wonderful. It was himself. Sucking his own fingers. Waiting. A hundred years of service. How long till then? How much longer?_

_-_ of her own madness and misplaced jealously, and Darien. Darien had been newly turned, not even a decade into his undeath, but his belief in his own immortality had been the death of him. As it was for many young vampires.

“ _Philippe.” The moonlight caressed her skin, made it glow, as Lady Lissette leaned down offering her hand. He took it, and she pulled him from his bed of soft earth like a gardener selecting a prize bloom. “Are you yourself, Philippe? Ma Belle will be so pleased.”_

Jean-Claude steepled his fingers as Byron continued his report, while the stack of introduction letters the younger vampire had brought in sat ignored on the desk. Truthfully, in any other circumstance it should have been the Londoner sitting in the high backed, leather chair. Even though the office still reflected the orderly black and white décor from Jean-Claude's time as Guilty Pleasures manager, that position had been ceded to Byron shortly after his arrival to St. Louis.

 _A hundred years, isolation interspaced with torture, with thirst, with_ Hunger _. A hundred years thrown in his face._ _His goldfinch had become a falcon, but would never again come to Jean-Claude's hand. He could not stay. He could not stay. HeCouldNotWouldNotMustNotNeverAgain-!_

The other was of Belle's line, and while he did not possess a recognized form of the ardeur his youthful appearance and skill in subtle bespellment were ideal for the business. It had been a relief, one less thing for Jean-Claude to worry about, and let him focus on downsizing and consolidating Nikoloas' Empire without seeming so weak as to invite attack. He'd had mixed success on that front. Between the Executioner and Death, all of those loyal to the old Master of the City had been purged. Such had created a power gap he'd quickly occupied as the only master vampire of sufficient strength yet alive, but it also left him with a severe shortfall of personnel. Attempting to fill those positions had led to the Earthmover's challenge, betrayals, and decisions made out of desperation more than deliberation.

_He woke, and It woke with him. It was no bloodlust. Lady Lissette had prepared him for that. She had held his hand and bared the necks. This was different. It stirred low in his stomach, reached out like some creature of the depths, and lips parted. Fangs bared. No- smiles. These were smiles. Surprise. Happiness._

“ _Oh, my. The things we can do with you.” His new Master spoke, but it wasn't kind. It wasn't his Lady. “Don't worry. I'll find you a... treat.”_

With the Circus and neighboring warehouse little but charred skeletons, the back office of Guilty Pleasures was a welcome, familiar respite. He resisted the urge to rub at the still tender flesh of his neck, instead letting his leg muscles tense and relax to burn off the energy. “It is true, then?”

“Near as can be, Jean.” Byron worried at a corner of his lower lip, hands thrust into his pockets. Having to put up four other vampires had come as a horrifying surprise, but he'd accepted the responsibility admirably. For all her thoughtless cruelty and petty grudges, Nikolaos had held the safety of her flock as her highest priority. She'd broken the taboo of secrecy seeking mortal help when they were being culled. The various sub-basements, once regarded as a paranoid precaution in the event the main lair was discovered and breeched, now saw service and made Jean-Claude look absolutely brilliant.

It almost made him regret Nikoloas' fate. Almost.

_Failure. He refused to be abused, and it was failure. Into the Coffin. She knew he hated it. Into the Coffin. Not enough tribute from the wolves. Failure. Into the Coffin. Back talked Theresa. Into the Coffin. Gave too much information to the Police. Into the Coffin. Into the Coffin. IntoTheCoffin._

If he had to sleep in a coffin again, he was sure he'd go mad, cross wrapped or not.

Byron shook himself, shedding equally poor memories like a dog water. “After the... after, Requiem and I couldn't really... I came here. He headed to Minsk. Half the kiss he joined is gone. Their Master of the City went up like Guy Fawkes on Bonfire Night, no rhyme or reason, and it spread. Jumped from him to his Second and then swept through the weaker vampires like a brushfire. Requiem said he felt something try to get inside him, like an animal scratching at his brain, but he shielded like hell, grabbed his sponsor, and got out. Ah, Requiem's got a letter in there. Too.”

_Hair like corn silk, like Lissette's. Soft pink dress, ribbon wrapping beneath under-developed breasts. A child. Like Valentina._

_Her eyes were not like Valentina's eyes. Power pooled and lapped against him as she cut her wrist, held it out, and he suckled like a babe. The Master of St. Louis was not of Belle's line. She was of the Dragon. She guarded her hoard._

“I see.” Jean-Claude's eyes narrowed, and a portion of his power and awareness cast out for his other half. He leaned forward, seemingly glancing at the stack of parchment and paper that promised possibility and poison. He could hear words disjointed by drugged sleep; someone was reading to Anita -

_They rode through the night, every night. Sod and deadfall guarded them from the sun. He couldn't go back; he was dead. “Philippe is dead.” His Lady promised, expression coy and lovely as she whispered his name like a secret. “But... Jean-Claude lives. If Jean-Claude can hold Philippe close and remember him.”_

\- to Harry. A moment of focused attention made the words clearer, but he did not recognize the book. Jean-Claude tapped his finger against a heavy brown folder that held more of interest to him than the introduction letters. “Then the Traveler's true body has been revealed, and Ma Petite has brought her tally of Council Deaths to two. Let the Rat King know I wish her guard increased, at least until she is well again. The price can be negotiated later.”

Byron nodded and turned to go, pausing at the door. “About Requiem?”

Jean-Claude tugged lightly at the connection to his servant. He let the cool certainty of her power trickle into his eyes, the desolation she was capable of wreaking. It was different from his magic. Bitter. He answered, each word formed slowly and with purpose, and dropped them like stones. “I shall consider it. Dismissed.”

Byron lowered his gaze, the eager peppiness of his body language turning to something more akin to a kicked stray. He bowed, and for all his hesitation it was elegant. His former Master had been one for theatrics. His former Master had called himself Dracula, third of that name.

Byron's former Master was just that. Former. In all senses of the word.

“ _I have written to Belle about you, Jean-Claude. She is curious, our Sourdre-de-Sang, and calls us to Court. You know how a Court functions, yes? You speak so well... I will warn you but once. Speak sweetly to Belle Morte, and please her if you can._

_You shall not be pleased if a Wild Hunt is called upon our heads, and our Fountain is as beautiful as she is capricious.”_

The door shut with the click of tumbling locks. Jean-Claude closed his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair, elbows bracing against the desk.

“Mon dieu.” He exhaled, concentrating on the heartbeat that was not his. Slow, but steady. She was alive. Impossibly alive. The Earthmover had been understandable. A combination of over-confidence and infighting on the ancient's part, and sheer dumb luck backed by recklessness on Harry's. But the Master of Minsk, or rather the Traveler, had been _over_ eight thousand kilometers away. Safe from any influence but his own Maker's, presumably. “Ma petite.”

What was she?

_It was raining, business was already slow, and the human authorities coming in to question his people frightened what few customers had braved the weather into leaving. From the way she hunched into her heavy jacket, arms crossed beneath her chest, he knew she wanted to leave with them._

“ _Anita!” The Sergeant called, looking away from Jean-Claude for a split second. A second Jean-Claude could have used to rip out the big man's throat._

_But Magic drifted off of her skin in a perfume of frozen starlight, diluted as it was by the rain. He gave her a practiced smile that had stolen breath and more. She ignored it, staring at his nose, refusing to meet his eyes no matter how much he teased._

_She refused to meet anyone's eyes._

Animators called to and controlled the dead, but only those with no Will of their own. Necromancers could chain a vampire to themselves, or so said legend, and were to be hunted down and killed to prevent such a corruption of the Vampire-Human bond. Further, any vampire they touched they could drain for power, a vampire's vampire in a way, stealing their magic and making it their own. Even he had thought such a thing too fantastic to be real. Power could be shared, grown, it could not be... stolen.

And yet...

Nikoloas had not been able to fly, not true flight as some masters did, but her elemental control over air was such it made no practical difference. He'd fought her, tried to turn her cyclone against her, but she'd thrown him IntoTheCoffin without even touching him. And he'd dreamed, then, for the first time in... a very long time. He'd dreamed, Will anchored to the world through his animator.

Jean-Claude shook his head, fingers kneading momentarily at his skull, and flipped open the folder. The Master of Chicago had put it together as a favor and one that, depending on the contents, Jean-Claude would be paying for _years_ down the line. A copy of an Indiana birth certificate lay pristine in the center announcing the existence of Anita Katherine Blake. Father Donald Blake. Mother Margaret Blake. This he knew.

Jean-Claude set the copy aside and found a class photo, ripped from a yearbook. A tiny, dark haired girl with a mouth full of missing teeth and a dress covered in cartoonish large numbers grinned with equally tiny people. Another image, as well as a church programmed, of the same girl slightly taller and wearing robes. She stood with others behind a table covered in bells. She was no longer smiling. There was a police report of a presumed break-in turned magical accident. An undead dog found in a young girl's bed - raised without ritual or blood. Or even conscious intent.

What was she?

The trail thinned after that, but bank records showed a steady, monthly amount had been transferred from Donald Blake's account-

_Smallest, and youngest, he huffed as he carried rough wood to the pile by their house. Hovel. It was already getting colder, his bare feet told him so, but as a carriage stopped on the road he forgot all about it. The carriage was beautiful._

_A man dressed in more clothes than his whole family had ever worn held a cloth to his face as he spoke with mother. Another was examining the girls. To old. To skinny. To... to. But Philippe was young enough to lack the scarring pockmarks of the last sickness to sweep through. He got to ride in the beautiful carriage._

_The coins exchanged for the privilege might be enough to see the rest of the family through winter._

-to one presumably belonging to Gloria Flores. It wasn't so strange. His own inquiries had revealed Harry had been sent to live with her grandmother to learn to control her budding powers. What was Augustine implying?

Ah.

A Vegas marriage certificate, side-by-side with another copy of Harry's birth record. Either his little witch was the world's largest premature baby on record or... Jean-Claude flipped the page. Newspaper clippings.

Malcom Dresden, beloved entertainer, died a month before Margaret Gentry had a rushed wedding with Donald Blake.

Jean-Claude leaned back in his seat.

“ _Stop calling me that.”_

“ _Ma petite? I assure you, Anita, it is only said with affection.”_

“ _You want to make fun of my height, whatever. Just stop with the Anita already! I filed papers and everything! My name is Harry -ah, Harriet- Dresden. Get it right or don't get it at all!”_

It wasn't madness, then. Not entirely. Jean-Claude closed the thick folder and scooted his chair out. A quick glance at the clock, not that he really needed it, showed him how much time was left before sunrise. Hours yet. And still so much to do. The vampire slid the folder into the locking briefcase it had come in, and then moved a painting on the wall to reveal a particular bit of wood paneling that could also be removed and set aside.

The safe was black. The combination the same as it had been when he installed it. Jean-Claude placed the briefcase in the safe and replaced panel and painting. He would deal with the missives requesting passage or asylum tomorrow night.

The Traveler was dead.

They might have changed their minds about... traveling.

Jean-Claude allowed himself a small smile. His Harry might have liked the pun. He crossed the room, opened the door, and nodded respectfully to his bodyguard for the night. The wererats had more than proved their worth. The Rom had predicted duplicity on the part of the Council. Expected it.

Sometimes Jean-Claude forgot that Rafael the Rat King had been born into Nikolaos reign, navigated the politics of the City with unerring skill, and took absolute authority over the Rodere from her with bloody tooth and claw.

Jean-Claude himself was a Master Vampire, but even among masters there was a whole spectrum of strength.  And so it was with shape shifters.  Witches.  Animators.  If a Master Werewolf was an Alpha, and a Master Animator was a Necromancer... was a Master Witch a Wizard?

"Eli, please have the car brought around.  We are going to Danse Macabre."

* * *

Ava O'Sullivan was a bundle of hot, nervous energy as their transport drove down the street Damien's dance club was on. She was a werewolf, and his insurance agent. Office hours closed at 5pm, which made it a bit difficult for vampires to get anything done on a civil front, but when Ava's livelihood depended on the majority of her clientele remaining unaware of her preternatural status accommodations could be made.

Accommodations such as extended office hours. Personal meetings. Fudging paperwork so that what had formerly been the insurance policies of Mr. Buchard were transferred to Jean-Claude himself. And the Circus had been very well insured. It had been Nikoloas' baby.

“I don't know what the final payout will be, boss.” Ava shuffled her papers as Eli took them around the line of patrons waiting to be permitted into the club. Men and women chatting excitedly as they stool in the night chill. If he Listened, he could know the topics of their conversation. The line was longer than usual, even for the harvest season. The werewolf shrugged, her suit jacket riding up with the action. She tugged it back into place. “I gotta do this by the books to keep the home office from looking too deeply, which means I gotta send my own inspectors to survey the damage.”

They parked.

“Then, Miss O'Sullivan, when can I begin to clear the damage and rebuild? I assure you, there is enough in the... war chest... to start.” Jean-Claude stated. It was true. Life went on. Businesses had to be run. For a very long time vampire expenses had been limited to bribes, and the occasional rent fee. They did not buy groceries. They did not need the same environmental comforts humans and even theriathrope required. Gold was amassed as another facet of power to be gathered and used when needed.

Though, expenses had gone up in recent years. They had paid for civil rights and legality in income tax, which meant oversight, which meant the American senate and congress were _still_ debating if the undead should pay back-taxes and inheritance taxes or not and just _how_ they were supposed to enforce such a thing. It was not as though there were a vampire census. Then there was the stipe-ends for favored donors, or outright paying for a night's blood from any body on the street.

Ava offered an encouraging smile as Eli opened the door for them. “Not too long. A week? Two tops? I'm going to ask if I can borrow Michelle's arson inspector to speed things along. Combined with the Department's testimony, though that is a little suspect with the, uh, thing that happened, it should be cut and dry case.”

“Very well.” Jean-Claude stated as he stepped out into the street.

A woman near the back of the line tugged her companion, whispered and pointed, and Jean-Claude painted a small knowing smile on his face as he headed toward the alley and back entrance. They were not so far from the Riverfront. If he strained his ears, he could pretend the whispers were the rippling of water. His voice rolled out in a purr. “Ladies, gentlemen.”

The back entrance opened into the kitchen, and the smells danced around him to the beat of dishes and knives. He nodded to the 'Kitchen King' a werefox that held no allegiance to anyone or anything but his profession, and received a shout of acknowledgement as well as location. The little King then promptly tasted a soup, frowned, and whapped the underling that made it with a wooden spoon he wielded like a scepter.

Passing from the kitchen to a narrow hallway, instead of following the sounds of music and stomping feet to the Club proper, Jean-Claude headed for the door at the other end. 6-6-4-9. He punched the numbers into a keypad and the electronic door hissed open revealing a cold storage chamber. Packs of meet, sacks of flour, and tubs of various ice cream filled the room. One wire rack, however, held nothing but a few fresh vegetables.

The Master of the City gripped the shelf, pulled, and a section of wall swung open like a trick door in a mystery play. Stairs awaited. He descended.

“I was wondering when you'd come to see me, mon ami.” Asher spoke with a sneer on the other side of silver engraved bars. He still smelled of smoke, and darker things. He'd discarded his burned shirt to put Jean-Claude's failure on full display. Newer burns, still healing, pink and puckered littered his exposed body. “Unfortunately, Damien is not a very good conversationalist.”

The older vampire did not respond from where he stood guard leaning against a wall. Arms crossed, expression blank, the Viking looked bored more than anything else. But when Jean-Claude examined the blood oath that linked them he could feel a simmering rage in the other. Barely there, but very present.

“I do not believe Damien cares for traitors, Asher.” Jean-Claude stepped up to the prison. He let a speck of hurt show, for the Asher he once knew. For the Asher he had hoped to draw out of that shell of anger. “Why? Belle will not let you back into her bed, even if you have her graces. I know you do not care for any others on the Council. I welcomed you as my Temoin.”

“Yes. Your second.” Asher whispered, harsh. “Always. In everything. Everyone.”

Eyes so blue and emotive they were nearly animal scraped at Jean-Claude's mind. Asher was particularly skilled at bespellment, at mind control, even on those with some form of natural resistance. He pounded at Jean-Claude's defenses like a rolling tide, inevitable, and Jean-Claude smothered all feeling as he reached back to the ties he held as Master of the City. They anchored him, his vampires, his Animal-to-Call, his Human-Servant.

He weathered the storm until Asher gave up, energy already spent from recovery and the holy symbols that entrapped him.

“So that is your choice.” Jean-Claude sounded hollow. He felt hollow.

“She called your name. She died, I felt her die. She was _mine_ but she died with _your_ name on her lips. Thinking about _you._ ” Spite and anger turned words to acid, flecks striking against Jean-Claude unseen. Damien watched, quiet and unobtrusive. Through him, Jean-Claude knew all were watching.

His servant lay insensate in a hospital bed.

The Circus, a symbol of vampire strength and political rallying point, was a ruin.

The Traveler was dead.

Could he do any less? His hands would shake if he raised them so against his once friend, once lover. He had been _happy_ with Asher. As happy as he'd been, however brief, with his Lady.

“Damien.” Jean-Claude spoke softly, still as a deer, and the bulkier vampire lifted off the wall to stand beside him. A heavy sword, different from the one he'd fought Warrick with, slid free of its sheath without a sound.

Something moved through Asher's body, peeking through the cloud of resentment and dark satisfaction. “You wouldn't... you have never...”

“Non. You won't. Never again.”

Blood spattered across Jean-Claude's face, but he didn't feel the slightest desire to lick it up. He very carefully did not feel anything.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I've been spelling Damian's name wrong. But, after thinking about it, my brain keeps wanting to spell it Damien so that is the spelling I am going with. Otherwise I'd end up with two Damien/an's running around the story and confusing myself and everyone further.
> 
> And you know what? For all that Anita talks about her mother dying I have checked three wikis and wracked my own brain I can't remember her ever actually telling us what her mother's name is. Or her fathers. Just that she has a 'wicked step mom' Judith and her little brother Josh.
> 
> Also, there was a lot I wanted to say in this chapter. Namely stuff that I wouldn't be able to easily explain in a regular Harry POV without making it a boring info dump. And yet still it feels like a bit like a bit of an info dump to me. Tried a new stylistic choice to make it more organic. I would appreciate feedback on how that went.


	10. Arc End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry has friend(s).
> 
> Belle doesn't.

I was vaguely aware of someone speaking as I woke up. I was more aware of the tightness in my face, my arm, and the steady throb of pain that came with every inhale. It was hard to tell where one uncomfortable twinge began and another ended. I had difficulty blinking and raised the hand that wasn't wrapped like a mummy to rub the sleep-glue out of my eyelashes. That done, I peered to my left.

Short, shiny blonde hair on a tall willowy body. Ronnie gave me a soft smile that, if I was anyone else, would have promised to show me every last trick she'd learned during her experimental college years and more. A cross, simple silver lines just large enough to fit in my palm, hung on open display drawing the eye from her slender neck to beginnings of her bosom. I'd given her that necklace when I'd replaced it with my pentacle. I'd given it to her after she had tracked me down and held me while I threw a rage induced crying fit that took out the television, dishwasher, water heater, and the sole picture of my supposed family of happy smiling golden haired normalcy.

I don't know what memories Ronnie had of me, but I didn't deserve her. And I think she mostly blamed the vampires 'mind games' for my presumed crisis and breakdown. Unfortunately, she lacked the proof to bring anyone to trial over it.

It was hard to gather evidence of a psychic crime when you aren't psychic yourself.

“Hey there, Harry.” Ronnie closed the paperback she'd been reading to me, using her finger as a bookmark. I thought I might have recognized the cover. Ronnie had actually been the one to suggest changing my name since I felt so strongly about it. A clean break from that history. A new start. And it wasn't like she was going to comment if I preferred a male version of my chosen name. “The year is 2026, Jean-Claude has seduced all women voters and become President. We need the Executioner. You are our only hope.”

I laughed, but my parched throat turned it into a cough. Ronnie helped me sit up and poured some ice water into a sippy cup. There was a penguin on it. I shuddered as I drank, the dust grating at my insides washing away. That done, I snorted and settled into what my fully functioning brain deduced was a hospital bed. I had to be supported by a stack of pillows, as I'd apparently broken the raising mechanism in my sleep.

“But, seriously, how long have I been out?”

“A little less than a week.” Ronnie sighed, crossing her legs as she leaned on the arm of her chair, closer to me. Her eyes drifted to the door and I could see a shadow move through the little rectangle of wire and glass. “You've been sedated most of that time. I, I hope you don't mind. I okay'd that. They had to do some minor surgery and the burns were more extensive than severe, but too much movement would risk popping the blisters...”

I closed my eyes and focused on my magic. It drifted around me, and I frowned, the skin on my face pulling warningly with the action. I couldn't place a finger on exactly what I was feeling: my pulse on my tongue or the cold certainty of my own self and power, but while it was still me and still very much the magic I'd called in this life and the one that came before something felt... different. Like instead of painting with a bright creamy egg yolk I was using golden oils.

I sighed. It was probably the drugs still in my system. I shook my head and assured Ronnie, “No, it's okay. I wouldn't have made you my proxy if I thought otherwise. Do you know when I can get out of here?”

That smile that made my toes curl died on her face. Light brown, sneaking toward grey eyes turned contemplative. The shadow outside the door was briefly joined by another, and the two traded places. I made the snap decision that once I was out, I was going to make a new staff -no doubt all the effort I had put into the last one had gone up with the Circus- a new right-and-proper blasting rod, and most importantly a shield bracelet. No more dilly-dallying. Money was no longer the barrier it once was.

I was going to enchant the shit out of everything.

Assuming my hospital bill didn't bankrupt me. Knowing Bert, he probably hadn't canceled my employment status yet in hopes of drawing me back in and assuaging the McNallys. Heh. Bert could foot the bill. It was the least Animator's, Inc. could do after all the shit I had to put up with him. Insurance premiums, _ho!_

“There's actually been some debate about that.” Ronnie spoke. “They had to cut into your right leg to remove wood fragments, as well as take a few layers of skin off your arm to be sure all the foreign material was gone. I declined the graft, though. Wasn't sure with your... magic stuff... you'd want that.”

She gestured to the arm that was doing a mummy impression. The gauze wasn't too tight, though maybe that was just me. I couldn't actually feel that arm. I mean, I could, but it was numb as hell. I was struck by a sense of Deja-vu so strong it was almost like vertigo.

“Your ribs are wrapped, too. But they didn't actually have to do anything invasive for that. The thing is... Harry?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah.”

“The doctors said you're healing _too fast_. They took some blood, couldn't find any trace of the virus, and a real shifter would have been out within a day. But-” She waffled her hand in the air. “-I get the feeling at least a few of them want to go all SCIENCE! On you. Louie's friends put a stop to that, though.”

“God save us from the pursuit of knowledge.” I mumbled, wondering if it would be possible to track down whatever waste remained from my surgeries and remotely destroying them. Probably. But depending on how much and how long it had been the effort wouldn't be worth it.

“It's probably the vampire marks.” I continued, slightly louder. “I already knew they made me stronger and faster, but I guess this is the first time I took enough damage to show off their healing factor.”

“Damn. I still think he's a manipulative jerk-wad you should have blown to kingdom-fucking-come... but if his vampire voo-doo kept you from dying I can't be too pissed at him.” She ran a hand through her short boyish hair. Head tilted, she peered at me with one eye. “Just don't sleep with him. You do that, and he wins. Full stop.”

“I know how an incubus works, Ronnie.” Exasperated, I exhaled in a rush, my breath causing my bangs to drift and tickle the peeling skin on my forehead. Surprised, I reached up and patted my brow. I had bangs! Despite the sudden spike of pain the action caused, I used both hands to begin exploring my head. “Quick! Mirror!”

Even for a woman, my hair had been a bit ridiculous. Long, dark, and curly unless I put ungodly amounts of product I couldn't even pronounce in it the stuff would get in my face and act as the perfect grappling point for the supernatural beasties that the great state of Missouri paid me to hunt. I hadn't wanted to get it cut, though, because I didn't have any hair dressers I trusted with properly disposing a bag or two of me.

Better safe than exploded.

All it would take was a shuffling of feet and suddenly some vodoun priestess has everything she needs to kill me at a distance. I'd compromised by running it through straightener some days, and putting it back in a braid or two on others. At least on the days I actually remembered to do something with it.

Ronnie laughed, a throaty thing full of relief and tiny helping of hysteria. She set Agatha Christie's _Curtain_ aside and rummaged through her purse for a compact, opening it and turning the clamshell of foundation and glass toward me. I looked like shit. Or like I'd had a love affair with a tanning bed and come out the worse in the divorce settlement.

My face was varying shades of red, only just starting to return to my new normal where white flakes of peeling dermis set up camp. Some places where so bad a clear gel had been applied. My neck also had a gauzy covering, bandages damp where I presumed more of the gel had been slathered beneath. Those bandages in turn covered my shoulder and further, and as my fingers drifted over the fabric I confirmed that there were indeed rather large blisters under there.

No touchy.

But it was my hair that made my abused skin stretch into a smile. My head felt lighter. Someone had come in and cleaned it up while I was out, a mild concern depending who, but instead of two feet of extra weight I had loose ringlets framing my face, fluffing out in a way that reminded me of Mouse after a bath. If I bothered with a straightener I could probably get it just down to my shoulders.

I'd never thought of myself as vain before, but as I looked at myself in Ronnie's compact I thought I could see distantly familiar cheekbones in the fluorescent lights. The shape of my eyes, without the shadows I'd been carrying with me, were something I was intimately familiar with. Different on a feminine face, but now that I was actively _looking_...

I was still short, but I suppose that was just in comparison to how tall I used to be. Five-one was actually rather average, for a woman.  For my mother.

“Hey, you want me to get Cherry? She's qualified to administer morphine and-”

“Nope!” I wiped my eyes, sipped at my sippy cup. My stomach gurgled. “I'm good! Just super! Been laying around too long, got plans! Burger plans! Time to check-out!”

I handed Ronnie's compact back to her, and for a split second the world tilted. I could feel soft satin sheet sheets beneath me instead of the standard easily bleachable hospital fare. I blew a raspberry. God damn drugs. I started to swing my legs over the side of the bed but stopped at Ronnie's expression.

“What?”

There was something long and thin sliding against the bare skin of my leg.

My friend blushed, cheeks turning a lovely pink. She stood quickly; mirror vanishing into her suit-pant's pocket instead of her purse as she moved. “Let me go get Cherry. They weren't sure how long you were going to be out, and after the third day... a nurse needs to take out the catheter.”

I sunk back into bed, suddenly realizing what that particular pressure down low was. My blush matched Ronnie's, not that she could tell as she rushed out the door. When it opened, I vaguely recognized the man that entered upon Ronnie's exit and who took up vigil across from the door. I definitely recognized the Beretta holstered under his arm that he didn't even try to conceal. I could smell the silver.

Oh. Right. Missouri was open-carry. Though I didn't think it extended to hospitals... or maybe it depended on the establishment. Or Jean-Claude doing... stuff.  The busy body.

I groaned. “Fuuuck.”

Beefy bodyguard snickered.

* * *

“ _No_.” Belle Morte keened, high and long. All was dark in her boudoir, but for a single candle, the bodies spilling off the massive bed still and cooling. Shards of cracked mirrors and broken perfume bottles littered the ground like fall leaves. “No.”

Huddled in on herself, long hair falling around her in a curtain of silken shadows, she hid her face from the dead. Her fingers, soft as butter, probed at the raised, irritated flesh of her face. Still there. She'd reveled and fed and gorged on blood and flesh alike, drawing strength from those lesser than her and yet the threads of puckered skin remained, only the tiniest bit mollified.

Belle screamed, long and loud, a primal call that started low in her belly and crawled out her throat to trample around the room and through the heavy door. Gradually, she could feel the reverberating response of her cats through the stone; a great yowling chorus seeking to sooth their mistress. Yet, she could still feel memory of embers on her lips, and tiny, chittering, mangled teeth biting clawing licking like mindless abominations!

She had leant Musette power so as to better observe Jean-Claude's little necromancer, had lingered there as a favor to the Traveler, and for her generosity -her _kindness_ \- her face was, was... Belle could not articulate what she felt. Breathing in the scent of sex and death she allowed a second scream to rip free of her chest. Power pulsed with it, the lone sentinel of light guttering before falling under her grief.

Belle pressed her palm against her scars, and wept, rage a ruby river that poured from her eyes. Her power surged, igniting the fires within. Did he think her stupid? Blind? Did he think he could just, toss her away? Replace her with some sub-par, dark haired trollop? She was Belle Morte, the Beautiful Death, and to enter her boudoir was to enter heaven. To turn from her was to choose damnation.

Lucifer was once the most beautiful of angels, too.

“No.” The fingers of one hand clawed at the floor, slowly closing, headless of the shards that cut slivers into her flesh. She stood, shakily at first and then with more certainty. Purpose. The darkness was her shield – the Sweet Dark.

The Queen of Nightmares may be content to allow the traitor rule his little hell, hiding behind law and tradition, but their leader was old and deluded. Cut off from the world behind chamber doors with her equally deluded compatriot and claiming that with the Traveler dead their number was once more in balance. Padma cared for little but his creatures, posturing and playing games as if he were a shapeshifter himself. Trying and failing to be anything but what he was: a pretender dependent on the borrowed power of others.

Likewise, Morte d'Amour did not care for any precedent the Council's decision set but only that the actions of Asher ended in the demise of a weapon he'd been waiting nearly nine hundred years to come to fruition. A weapon of which he demanded recompenses for, and which Padma laughingly argued d'Amour was fully justified in receiving.

“I do not need their permission.” Belle seethed, grief and rage turning to cold calculation like lead transmuting into gold. The Queen, Dragon, even d'Amour had reached the limits of their power. They were strong, immensely so, but at their limits. Belle Morte however... “My power grows. I do not need an Animal-to-Call. A Human-Servant. _My power grows._ ”

Her favored vassal, her feared bourreau, may be caught and contained by mere mortals an ocean away, but Belle had never been dependent on others. She rubbed her face, palm sliding down her neck and chest to the sensitive flesh of her bare stomach. Scarred still, ugly, but lesser. She was healing. She _would_ heal. Lucifer had fallen to pride. Jean-Claude had come crawling to her before, begging indulgence after leaving with Asher and their whore. He would do so again.

He would not a third time.

Belle smiled in the darkness, skin shimmering, luminescent with power. Broken shards of mirror glittered like stars, reflecting her tainted glory back to her. She would place her agents. She would wait, and watch, stalking her prey like the cats that came to her call. Keeping to the letter of the law that their Queen espoused.

The Mother of All's creatures stirred at her touch.

Eventually, they would wake.

And so then she would be Queen, and the rest of the Council would take knee where she walked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! Here is the end of Guilt Free Pleasures (For Real This Time) but there are a few continuations of the universe in the works. They will however be under their own stories. Gonna take a short break from writing fanfic and let the muse marinade.
> 
> Oh, and because it probably isn't going to come up anytime soon within the story itself, do to Harry yammering about terrorists Dolph called it in to federal office and Musette's coffin got stopped and confiscated at the airport.


End file.
